Indeed, ask any cop allowed to do so….
COLOGNE’S NEW YEAR’S EVE SURPRISE: PROFILING SEEMS TO WORK
To avoid a scenario like last year’s New Year’s Eve, when over two thousand mostly Arab men sexually assaulted and robbed more than a thousand women, this year, the police in Cologne scrutinised groups of young Arab-looking.
The takeaway: It is indeed possible to protect European citizens. All one needs to do is deploy a massive police force throughout the city, identify known groups of troublemakers before they arrive, check their IDs and make sure that the message that they’re being watched wherever they go, get’s across. Which is, by the way, exactly what happens in Germany every weekend before and after soccer matches: The police escorts visiting supporters from railway and coach stations to and from the soccer stadiums.
The hooligans to watch on New Year’s Eve were North African migrants, especially those from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia (“Nafris”, as they are colloquially called by the police) who travel and act in groups of many hundreds and have turned out to be quite a handful. Roughly half of all North African migrants in Germany has a police record. Among the Algerians the figure is a staggering 75 percent. According to a leaked internal police report, Nafris are “extremely aggressive” and resist arrests with all sorts of violence: They kick and bite officers or attack them with knives, brass knuckles and pieces of broken glass.
So when Cologne’s (new) Police Chief Juergen Mathies was informed by the Federal Police that, just like last year, a thousand “highly aggressive” Nafris were due to arrive in Cologne, he treated the situation like a high-risk soccer game, as if it was a derby match between Cologne and Leverkusen.
