Three sex offences a month are recorded in Görlitzer Park
Thirty years ago the site of the old Görlitz station in Berlin was a symbol of the city’s renewal, as heaps of disintegrating concrete and industrial waste gave way to a park with an amphitheatre, an orchard and a petting zoo.
Today it is an emblem of fraying law and order, where drug dealers openly hawk dubious chemicals to passers-by and police record three sex offences a month on average.
An attempt by the local authorities to regulate the drugs trade by asking dealers to stand in squares demarcated by lines of pink spray paint was a notorious failure derided by Germany’s national narcotics commissioner as a “surrender of the rule of law”.
The alleged robbery and gang rape of a 27-year-old woman in front of her boyfriend has prompted Berlin’s conservative-led administration to set out a radical plan to improve the park with floodlights, a perimeter fence, CCTV surveillance and limited opening hours.
Iris Spranger, the city state’s Social Democratic interior minister, said the 35-acre park, known as “Görli”, would be enclosed by a fence with video cameras watching over 17 entrances featuring turnstiles so it can be shut at night.
Benjamin Jendro, a spokesman for Berlin’s police union, said it was time to reverse a “catastrophic failure of regulatory and security policy” by the Greens-led council of the local Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district. “There are a large number of blind spots for criminality, which means not only that dealers can stash their wares, but also that offences can happen under the cover of darkness,” he told the RBB public broadcaster.
There have been 11 suspected rapes in the park over the past year; since 2018, there have been five cases of murder or manslaughter and 708 of actual or grievous bodily harm. A significant proportion of these crimes have been attributed to men of African origin, prompting debate about racial profiling and the limits of liberal tolerance.
Oliver Nöll, the Left party deputy mayor of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, said entrenched crime was not unique to Görlitzer Park and called for a city-wide strategy instead.
The greatest reason for the rise of the far right in Europe is the left.
Raped in front of the boyfriend? My goodness. So even someone being around couldn’t stop this shit from happening.
Probably were all those future doctors and lawyers practicing their craft.
Having walked through that park part of the issue is that most of it is pitch black at night.
I have almost walked head on into other people crossing it before.
The described solution in the article of fences, turnstiles, floodlights, and security cameras seems overly aggressive to me. Consistent lighting across the park at night would I think do wonders
7 comments
**Article text**
Three sex offences a month are recorded in Görlitzer Park
Thirty years ago the site of the old Görlitz station in Berlin was a symbol of the city’s renewal, as heaps of disintegrating concrete and industrial waste gave way to a park with an amphitheatre, an orchard and a petting zoo.
Today it is an emblem of fraying law and order, where drug dealers openly hawk dubious chemicals to passers-by and police record three sex offences a month on average.
An attempt by the local authorities to regulate the drugs trade by asking dealers to stand in squares demarcated by lines of pink spray paint was a notorious failure derided by Germany’s national narcotics commissioner as a “surrender of the rule of law”.
The alleged robbery and gang rape of a 27-year-old woman in front of her boyfriend has prompted Berlin’s conservative-led administration to set out a radical plan to improve the park with floodlights, a perimeter fence, CCTV surveillance and limited opening hours.
Iris Spranger, the city state’s Social Democratic interior minister, said the 35-acre park, known as “Görli”, would be enclosed by a fence with video cameras watching over 17 entrances featuring turnstiles so it can be shut at night.
Benjamin Jendro, a spokesman for Berlin’s police union, said it was time to reverse a “catastrophic failure of regulatory and security policy” by the Greens-led council of the local Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district. “There are a large number of blind spots for criminality, which means not only that dealers can stash their wares, but also that offences can happen under the cover of darkness,” he told the RBB public broadcaster.
There have been 11 suspected rapes in the park over the past year; since 2018, there have been five cases of murder or manslaughter and 708 of actual or grievous bodily harm. A significant proportion of these crimes have been attributed to men of African origin, prompting debate about racial profiling and the limits of liberal tolerance.
Oliver Nöll, the Left party deputy mayor of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, said entrenched crime was not unique to Görlitzer Park and called for a city-wide strategy instead.
The greatest reason for the rise of the far right in Europe is the left.
Raped in front of the boyfriend? My goodness. So even someone being around couldn’t stop this shit from happening.
Good morning, ~~Vietnam~~ Berlin: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015–16_New_Year’s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015–16_New_Year's_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany)
must be those Eastern Asians again… /s
Probably were all those future doctors and lawyers practicing their craft.
Having walked through that park part of the issue is that most of it is pitch black at night.
I have almost walked head on into other people crossing it before.
The described solution in the article of fences, turnstiles, floodlights, and security cameras seems overly aggressive to me. Consistent lighting across the park at night would I think do wonders