In Villingen Schwenningen on the first of July there were major clashes between young people and security forces during a city festival. The peculiarity here is that both the city and the police reported about it to the public for the first time last week, more than three weeks after the events.
The aforementioned city festival, the "long night of culture" is a large-scale event that takes place on a regular basis. Every first Saturday in July in the city center of Schwenningen this event takes place. There are various stands for food and drinks, four open-air stages with live music and thousands of visitors. This year alone, the organizers spoke of around 17,000 visitors. In recent years, however, there have been clashes between young people and the police on the fringes of the festival. Despite a strengthened security concept of the city, whereby they had increased forces of police and public order office patrol the area of the festival and in the side streets, this continuity did not break this year.
In the course of the confrontations, five psuedo-cops of the public order department and one policewoman are said to have been injured. Some of them are said to have severe blast trauma, which still showed effects more than a week after the events. One person accused of throwing firecrackers at the police was arrested. In addition it is to have come according to civil newspapers still to five criminal as well as seven disorderly conduct announcements, eight expulsions and three recognizing service treatments against allegedly involved persons.
Even if in the past years at that festival often came to clashes with the police, this year there are some peculiarities. It seems that this year the quality of the confrontations has increased. Accordingly, the published report says: "The fringe phenomena in the side streets, such as Uhlandstraße or at the C&A store, we already had in previous years. The many confrontations, the aggressive mood, the attacks on the KOD forces posed a new challenge for us."
The most obvious peculiarity, however, is that in the aftermath of the events, they were not reported at all. It was not until more than three weeks after the clashes that the city and the police reported on them for the first time in a joint statement. The mayor of Villingen-Schwenningen Jürgen Roth speaks of "internal coordination errors", the police headquarters of Constance speaks of internal misunderstandings in the reporting, among other things, the incorrect assignment of the districts and a differently interpreted conversation with a law enforcement officer should have ensured that this incident was dismissed as processed and then not processed further.
All of these reports do not sound very credible. Especially when you consider that otherwise a police report is actually published for every teenager who smokes weed. Considering what happened and the way it is dealt with, the suspicion that the city deliberately tried to sweep those events under the table is obvious. Perhaps the responsible politicians were worried that the events of the first of July would be bad for the image of the city. In addition, such events always mean a loss of control for the ruling class, through which the masses can see that the ruling conditions can be attacked.
For the next year at that festival, new strengthened security measures are planned. These measures include, among other things, "denying access to recognized troublemakers in the future, enforcing the ban on carrying firecrackers, and examining the more restrictive handling of the serving of alcohol". In order to enforce this, even more personal checks, searches, restrictions, in short, even more repressive measures against the youth are needed. But it is unlikely that they will succeed in limiting the rising anger and resistance of the masses.
