Subproject C02 — Security, police and urban space. Security heuristics and repertoires using the example of Frankfurt/Main and Munich
third funding stage (2022-2025)
The content of the comparative and transfer study is the analysis of the prevailing security heuristics in the police and the associated police security regimes in the Weimar Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. As political or economic centres, administrative and university cities, the focus is on the cities of Frankfurt a.M. and Munich. The importance of the Prussian-influenced city of Hesse and the Bavarian state capital extended far beyond the region and the state. In both cities, the police acted as the main security actor; it has often faced similar challenges, but without always acting in the same way.
The project considers specifically spatio-temporally defined situations in which security problems (e.B increased traffic volumes, demonstrations, revolution, terrorism, political violence) were articulated. These created considerable pressure on the part of political and police security actors to act, which ultimately led to new security heuristics and the resulting practices. The investigation focuses on two aspects of police security: (1) the identification, marking and evaluative assessment of security-relevant situations by the police and (2) those action-related possibilities with which the perceived security problems should be overcome. The question to be asked is which competences were attributed to the police as a security actor in urban areas and how did they act in the respective field of action described by the label “security”?
