Picture: Zurich welcomes German police officers for some The European soccer championship has hit Zurich and with it politicians’ fear of hooligans has reached its zenith. The police have sealed off central city parts and one has to pay to enter the “fan zones”. A big part of the traffic gets rerouted and after 7pm most trams only operate on a limited scale. And everywhere police. One can see police officers from all over Switzerland in Zurich, but not only from Switzerland. As the Swiss police are not trained in hand-to-hand-combat, they asked their German colleagues to help them out. The German are trained in hitting hard and fast at close range, therefore they earned themselves the nickname “Prügelpolizei” (“Prügelpolizei” roughly means police sluggers). I, as a citizen who is not interested in soccer I feel threatened by the government beefying up its security apparatus not only with police officers from other parts of Switzerland but also with foreign police in full riot gear. I wonder why the Swiss police, despite their expensive BMW 5 and X5 cars, are not man enough to confront a few hooligans. So much of visible government force is against my understanding of liberalism.
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