Editorial Comment
by Otto Diederichs
After an extended interruption of publication which the editorial staff of CILIP used to brood over: to march on or go to pasture, that’s the question, we finally arrived at a decision. Despite devastating financial difficulties, we shall march on at least for the current year. This, in essence, explains why we are going to press so late this year. It additionally proved impossible to deal with a special theme, so the present issue contains a ‚potpourri‘ of topical issues.

The 1997 CASTOR-Transport of Nuclear Waste
by Wolf-Dieter Narr
Between the 28th of February and the 5th of March, the most extensive and most expensive police operation in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany took place in the Lüchow-Dannenberg region of Lower Saxony. The transport of nuclear waste to the nuclear waste deposit and storage facilities at Gorleben signified the resolve on the part of the national government aided by the state government of Lower Saxony to proceed with the enforcement of a one-sided decision with the help of the police. Not politics, police instead. The ‚Committee for Basic Rights and Democracy‘ sent more than a dozen observers to the area to monitor the situation. The article provides an analytic report on the incident.

Organised Crime According to Official Statistics
by Norbert Pütter
The rationale for police interest in developing its „Situation Reports on Organised Crime“ was to provide politicians and the interested public with cogent grounds for its diagnosis of the development and growth of organised crime in the FRG. At the beginning of 1992, the „Working Group Detective Division“ appointed a special ad-hoc commission with the task of developing a comprehensive situation report for the year 1991. Since then the police have continued to prepare yearly situation reports. Despite the broad public reception of these annual reports, they do not reflect the imminent threat by organised crime they are purported to.

Wiretapping in the Federal Republic of Germany
by Antonia Wirth
A new record involving a total of 8.112 wiretaps was set in the FRG in 1996. What this means is that an approximate total of one million persons‘ telephone calls were tapped. A number of regulations have been implanted in the penal code to make it legally possible to violate the principle of privileged telephonic communication which, if adhered to by the police and state’s attorneys, are intended to protect the rights of privacy of civil society. The reports of several data protection commissioners provide grounds for serious doubts as to whether these regulations are as effective as they are intended to be.

Berlin Police Reform
by Otto Diederichs
When the Swiss management counselling service ‚Knight-Wegenstein‘ was awarded a contract to study the Berlin police force and develop proposals for a more effective organisation and task planning system such studies were relative innovative. Today, hiring the services of external management counselling agencies has become the standard practice of police leadership seeking to initiate structural reform within the police. For nearly two years another consulting firm has been occupied with producing a study of the Berlin police force. It key criticisms target the central changes initiated in 1972.

Male Domestic Violence Against Women
by Martina Kant
Despite the fact that no reliable statistics on domestic violence are not available (estimates range from 100,000 to 4 million incidents a year), the „Federal Commission on Domestic Violence“ established by the federal government proceeds from the assumption that domestic violence is the most common form of violence in German society. The police place a key role in this area, because they are the only agency available around the clock and in a position to actively intervene in cases of abuse. The police are the public agency most often contacted by women who have become victims of violence and abuse. Their calls for help from the police often have disappointing results.

European Security Information System (EuSIS)
by Otto Diederichs
The private security has been astonishingly overdue in recognising the potential of Internet as an investigative and search instrument. Finally, in March of this year such a system entered the Internet and can be found under the home page address:http://www.eusis.de Because the databank is conceived of as a profit-oriented operation it has a completely different structure than the tradition search files used by police organisations. Company advertising, available literature as well as a „marketplace“ complete with job offers and job-seeking ads, general classified want-ads, offers of co-operation etc. form the periphery of a data bank involving individual, factual and incident file search lists. As the proprietors insist and emphasise, they are very interested in not only co-operating with one another, but they also seek co-operation with state security services.

An Alternative Conception for EUROPOL
by Thilo Weichert
The debate over EUROPOL has become extremely heated. On the one hand, protagonists feel that EUROPOL constitutes Europe’s only chance of successfully confronting internationally organised crime, civil rights activists point to a completely different problem: there exist neither democratic legitimation, nor democratic control mechanism for EUROPOL. Executive responsibility does not exist in any form whatsoever. The legal protections for normal citizens are less than the standards normally required for states governed by law. For this reason, civil rights activists point to the fact that EUROPOL signals the relinquishment of all of the traditional legal, civil rights and democratic traditions currently effective in all of the states of Europe. The author, chairperson of the ‚German association for Data Protection‘ (Deutsche Vereinigung für Datenschutz), develops an alternative model.

Techno-revolution in the Swiss Police Force
by Heiner Busch
When the Swiss Parliamentary Investigating Commission began its investigation of conditions in the Confederate Justice and Police Department and the national police force within this ministry one of the first things, it encountered was tons and tons of paper: filecards (so-called fiches) and dossiers on a total of 900.000 individuals which had been cardfiled as politically suspicious and unreliable. Today, any analogous commission, would have to move a mouse on the mouse-pad to enter into the police computer net, because one of the encompassing results of the ‚filecard scandal‘ was to expand and further develop existing computer systems in the Swiss police administration. The author provides a survey of the current state of computerisation within the Swiss police force.