First weekly digest in a long time.  We’ll see if it becomes a regular thing again.

Worth Reading

• Rand Richards Cooper, Lessons from German Policing

In the Rhine city where I lived, I played noontime chess in the park with a group of elderly men. They were all former Wehrmacht soldiers, and we had long conversations about World War II, Hitler, and the Holocaust. Also at the park was a group of Pennern—bums, drunks—who hung out around benches beneath a pergola near the chess area. They were a motley crew, tattooed, unhealthy, rowdy. One day, one of them was especially drunk and unruly, cursing at passersby. The Polizei arrived. The man was obstreperous. They cautioned him and he belligerently waved them away, screaming profanity. Uh-oh, I thought, here we go.

Yet the situation didn’t escalate….

The roots of German policing, as Katrin Bennhold and Melissa Eddy wrote in the New York Times in June, trace to the reconstruction period after World War II, when Allied occupying forces and the new postwar German leadership sought to “demilitarize and civilize” the police as a way of remedying the Nazi-era corruption of policing. Seventy years later, Bennhold and Eddy observe, “that early ambition of demilitarization has morphed into a broad-based strategy of de-escalation that has become the bedrock of modern German policing.”

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