Word: hamburg
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...October 1996, a mentally disturbed woman scratched the paint on 10 cars parked along the streets of Hamburg, Germany's freewheeling port city. The woman found herself before a judge named Ronald Barnabas Schill, who promptly sentenced her to two-and-a-half years in prison for her vandalism. Stunned, newspapers branded Schill Judge Merciless, and the sobriquet stuck through a sheaf of draconian sentences. Trading on his law-and-order image, Schill organized his own political party, the Law and Order Offensive, and won a stunning 19.4% of the vote in municipal elections last year. Now he is taking...
Calling prosperous, well-scrubbed Hamburg a catastrophe may strike many as an exaggeration, but then Schill, 43, has forged his political career by squeezing the crime problem for all it's worth. He calls Hamburg the "German stronghold of crime," an image that shot around the world when it was discovered that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers had plotted in the city. Schill made two campaign promises in last year's city elections: to cut crime by half in his first 100 days in office and to increase the police force by 2,000 officers. The judge, whose party...
Most controversial of all may be Schill's use of crime statistics to portray Hamburg as a hotbed of criminality. The number of crimes reported in 2001 rose by 12.1% compared with 2000, but a single case of stock fraud involving 26,500 victims scattered throughout Germany accounted for most of the increase. In fact, breaking-and-entering cases declined by 19.3% last year and muggings by 27.2%, according to police statistics. Still, some 60% of voters surveyed in one poll found street crime the biggest issue in the election. "The old government didn't address problems like drug crime...
...Hamburg has hired only 250 new police officers, a fraction of Schill's promised 2,000. The new cops will take two-and-a-half years to complete their training. Hamburg has also added 250 security guards, who will be assigned to protect buildings such as the American consulate, freeing up another 250 police to work against crime. The city did find an innovative way of forcing drug addicts out of the main train station. In addition to deploying more police patrols, the station now plays endless repeats of Vivaldi at high volume to drive people away...
...attacks, the Paris plot and the attempt to destroy Flight 63 all share a common cast of characters. Reid seems to have known Moussaoui, Beghal and Trabelsi; Moussaoui was connected to Ramzi Binalshibh, a fugitive alleged by the FBI and German authorities to have been a member of the Hamburg cell that planned the Sept. 11 attacks; Akhnouche knew them all. A French official says, "My personal theory is that all these radical Islamists have crossed paths in Afghan camps, London or often both...