Martin Horn, the mayor of Freiburg, bought a round of batons for the deparment of public order. The city of Karlsruhe, witch uses the same kind of batons for there staff, has called their new batons “helping means for deescalation”. All of the he 17 public order employees will soon be equipped with of those batons.

In May the mayor first talked about the plan for the new batons and now he just made cold hard facts and simply singlehandedly bought them. That is a thing that he can just do because being the mayor he is automatically also head of the police department.

To justify the purchase after the fact two members of the city council went out of their way to show how necessary they supposedly would be, by accompanying two officials of the department of public order for two nights. In an article they wrote afterwards they give a taste of who they think are likely targets to be hit by those new batons. In the cross hair: Mostly people being outside in groups despite the corona-measures, people peeing outside and the homeless in the city center.

With rising armament, the department of public order is being more and more developed to be a second police force. The tendency can be clearly seen in Stuttgart, also located within the federal state of Baden-Würtenberg, were the employees of the department of public order now carry guns and police dogs. What also has to be kept in mind in the face of the increasing armament of the department of public order are the latest assaults by state officials in uniform against a young black women in Betzenhausen or against a women who was hurt and dragged to the police station on the grounds that she demanded to be treated respectfully by the police.