„Auf den Krieg vorbereiten, wenn du Frieden willst“: eine Analyse des polizeilichen Gefahrennarrativs

It is intuitively and scientifically undisputed that the police profession carries an inherent risk of victimization by violence; however, it is scientifically untenable that the risk of violence among police officers in Germany is omnipresent and has increased dramatically in recent years. In this view, common intuition overrides available evidence. In our article, we take a closer look inside the police force and identify exactly the narrative that announces a smoldering danger of violence. As we show, the narrative has a system: the danger narrative shows itself in metaphors such as the “danger radar”, individual descriptions, abbreviated representations of statistics or the selective handling of external scientific data. Aggregated to form a coherent worldview, the narrative is presented in police training, in technical papers and textbooks, and in important advocacy groups of the German police force, thus stabilizing itself in a process of reciprocal references.