Chronicle of the police in North Rhine-Westphalia from - Foreword. This chronicle deals with the history of the North Rhine-Westphalian police force from the end of the war in to the year More than 1, small articles illustrate the transformation of the police force in North Rhine-Westphalia on the basis of individual events. The articles, arranged chronologically by year, deal equally with organizational, legal, technical, personal, political and social changes that have taken place in the police force or have had an impact on the police from outside.
The history of the North Rhine-Westphalian police is largely identical to the history of the police forces in the other "old" federal states, which were founded after the war in the territories of the American, British and French occupation zones. A comparison with the German police in the German Democratic Republic is not easily possible for the period from until the reunification of the two German states.
Their developments were too different for this. With reunification, however, the police forces in the old and new federal states were largely brought into line with each other, so that the police in all 16 federal states are now at roughly the same organizational and legal level. In particular, the police uniforms of the federal states are also uniform, and police law is largely uniform.
The author of this text is the former North Rhine-Westphalian police officer Dr. Frank Kawelovski. The original German version of this chronicle can be found on the homepage "Polizeigeschichte Infopool":. This text has not been translated by the author, but by the translation program DeepL. Linguistic errors in the translation cannot be ruled out. The police force is in a desolate state. Many officers had lost their lives in the war, were in Allied prison camps or had fled in the expectation of being held accountable for crimes against humanity committed during the National Socialist era.
The security situation in the country is difficult. Poverty causes thefts, robberies and homicides and marauding groups of released forced laborers with captured Wehrmacht weapons make the streets unsafe. Averting danger places high demands on the remaining police: everywhere there are buildings in danger of collapse, unexploded bombs, grenades and impassable roads.
