Material battle with the "Moroccan mafia"

Since 2015, NRW has been plagued by gangs of automatic guns from the Netherlands. The NRW police tried to deal decisive blows to the perpetrators for almost the same amount of time. But in vain. Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) has now had to announce that the work of the special commission he has set up for the gangs will continue - although the SoKo should stop working this month.

But the police have a hard time with this opponent. The perpetrators belong to a network of mostly Moroccan-Dutch criminals with up to 700 men. In the Netherlands, they are also held responsible for the murder of the journalist Peter de Vries. De Vries had researched in the milieu of the so-called "Moroccan mafia".

According to the police, these criminals are extremely trainable and superior to law enforcement officers in their risky brutality. They always manage to escape the police in the Netherlands because they are more willing to take risks in their getaway cars. They race through inner cities at 120 things and lose the officers – who care more about their lives. In addition, the network is constantly recruiting new criminals. Substitutes for caught perpetrators are therefore plentiful.

And so, the 11,000 or so ATMs in North Rhine-Westphalia continue to be used. By August 2022, around 130 machines were already banging and cracking. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the number of blasts in the first quarter alone tripled compared to the same period last year. The damage rose to 10.7 million euros by mid-2022. That corresponds to the damage of the entire year 2020. So much for the sobering record of seven years of fighting automatic sprinklers.

There are reasons for that. The tank crackers were largely pushed out of the Netherlands in 2015 because the banks there radically upgraded their machines and got rid of machines that were not upgraded. Driven by Reuls SoKo, the banks and savings banks in NRW are also following this path. But unlike in 2015, the criminal gangs no longer evade. They accept the fight and are now arming themselves. Years ago, they used gas to blast them, but today they mostly use explosives - even if they have to dig deeper into their pockets to do so. And set off far more dangerous explosions.

In doing so, however, they also drive up the price for effective protection at banks and savings banks. The Rhenish Savings Banks and Giro Association recently summed up the dilemma as follows: "The more we upgrade, the greater the damage." And the more the costs of the explosive attacks shot up. An almost bitter battle of materials takes place between the tank busters and their victims over the question of who invests more money – the criminals in their tools or the banks in their protection?

One can hope that the financial institutions will muster the larger financial reserves. But it is still strange: the police almost seem like a spectator in this duel, who mostly confine themselves to encouraging the victims to protect themselves. Victory over the criminals in this fight does not primarily depend on the holder of the state monopoly on the use of force, but on the willingness of the banks to invest. There has long been a debate as to whether more staff for mobile border guards could curb the desire of criminals to travel from the neighboring country. But this original state approach was discarded - neither the federal nor the state want to put so much money into additional police.