Wolfgang Albers (Chief of Police)

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Wolfgang Albers, 2016 (here at the press conference on January 5th on the occasion of the New Year's Eve attacks in Cologne )

Wolfgang Albers (born December 12, 1955 in Munich ) is a German lawyer . From 2002 to 2011 he was police chief in Bonn and from 2011 to the beginning of 2016 police chief in Cologne .

Life

Wolfgang Albers studied law at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn from 1979 to 1985 . He was politically active with the Young Democrats and was one of the organizers of the great peace demonstrations in Bonn's Hofgarten at the beginning of the 1980s , which were directed at the then seat of government of the Federal Republic of Germany against the so-called NATO double decision and the nuclear armament in Western Europe and the USA.

In the course of his professional activity, Albers took up residence in Cologne at the end of the 1980s, which he retained during his later work in Düsseldorf . After his appointment as police chief in Bonn in 2002, he moved with his family to the federal city . There he volunteered in the evangelical church district of Bonn and was an appointed member of the synod . He kept his residence in Bonn when he became the Cologne police chief in 2011.

He is a member of the SPD .

In 2017 he became one of the part-time non-theological members of the church leadership of the Ev. Church in the Rhineland elected.

Wolfgang Albers is married and has an adult daughter. He lives with his wife in Bonn- Endenich .

Professional career

After passing the second state examination in law , Albers joined the public service of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) in 1988 and initially worked as an administrative lawyer for the Cologne district government . In 1990 he was acting as head of what was then the Leverkusen police headquarters . He was then seconded to the NRW Ministry of the Interior as a ministerial official , followed by a secondment to the Ministry of the Interior of the federal state of Brandenburg, which was newly founded after the fall of the GDR . In 1991 he moved to the ministerial office of the then North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Herbert Schnoor ( SPD ) and in 1994 became his personal advisor. From 1995 he held the same position with NRW Interior Minister Franz-Josef Kniola (SPD, Schnoor's successor in the Rau V cabinet ) after he had retired for reasons of age. In 1997, Albers moved to the Düsseldorf district government , where he took over the management of the municipal department with responsibility for municipal supervision , building and housing and held it until 2002.

Police headquarters in the Ramersdorf district in Bonn-Beuel, 2006

From July 2002 to September 2011, Albers was police chief in Bonn. The then NRW Interior Minister Fritz Behrens (SPD) appointed him. Albers succeeded Dierk Henning Schnitzler , who went into retirement. During his service as head of the Bonn Police Headquarters , Albers merged police stations , abolished the cavalry squadron and cut staff. The Police Union (GdP) in Bonn criticized and complained at the beginning of 2010 that there was no longer sufficient patrol in the area.

The new building of the Bonn Police Headquarters in Bonn-Ramersdorf , which was completed in the summer of 2006 and moved into in October 2006, fell during Albers' term of office in Bonn .

His successor there was the lawyer Ursula Brohl-Sowa , who has headed the Bonn Police Headquarters since November 2011.

Cologne Police Headquarters in the Kalk district of Cologne , 2007

In September 2011, Albers was appointed police president in Cologne by NRW Interior Minister Ralf Jäger (SPD). Albers succeeded Klaus Steffenhagen , who was retiring. As head of the Cologne Police Headquarters  - the largest police authority in North Rhine-Westphalia - based in Cologne, he was responsible for the independent cities of Cologne and Leverkusen as well as for all motorways in the Cologne district. There were 5,000 officers in his area of ​​responsibility for the safety of around 1.2 million people.

In June 2014, Jäger appointed Albers to an expert commission on demographic change in the police force in North Rhine-Westphalia . The four-person commission, which, in addition to Albers, included the Münster police chief Hubert Wimber (member of the Greens ), the district administrator of the Mettmann district Thomas Hendele ( CDU ) and Professor Jürgen Weibler from the Fern-Universität Hagen , submitted its final report a year later (see publication) with proposals for a police reform in NRW. The commission showed various savings potentials, but could not agree on a common model with regard to the police organization .

Albers was criticized several times for his administration. In October 2014 he was accused of having underestimated the violence of demonstrators at the “ Hooligans against Salafists ” event and that the Cologne police had made a number of tactical mistakes. 45 police officers were injured during the operation. A comparable event in Hanover, Lower Saxony, went far more lightly there, among other things because of a strictly enforced alcohol ban and massive controls.

In 2015 there was an affair about alleged brutal and inhumane rituals at the “ Special Operations Command  3” (SEK) of the Cologne police. The CDU in the Düsseldorf state parliament and in Cologne blamed Albers for this and called for his resignation. Albers initially did not react to media reports and then dissolved the unit. The Aachen public prosecutor's office closed its investigation and found no evidence of criminal offenses committed by the SEK officials. According to the FAZ, Albers was therefore unpopular with large parts of the Cologne officials and disqualified as an employer. The successor as police chief, Jürgen Mathies , put the special forces back to normal.

After the events on New Year's Eve 2015/2016 in Cologne, Albers was put into temporary retirement by NRW Interior Minister Jäger on January 8, 2016 . In addition to misjudging the situation, his police leadership was accused of initially hushing up the refugee relationship of the attacks. In the “important incident report”, which is intended for all management levels up to the minister, the reference to asylum seekers among the suspects against the express protest of the head of operations was deleted as “politically sensitive”. Cologne's Lord Mayor Henriette Reker (independent) complained that she had been left in the dark about the full picture of the night of action. On New Year's morning, the press office of his authority drew a positive balance of New Year's Eve: the celebrations were largely peaceful and the situation was "relaxed". His successor in office was Jürgen Mathies .

A few days after Albers was put into temporary retirement, NRW Interior Minister Jäger accused the Cologne police of serious errors on New Year's Eve in a special meeting of the Interior Committee in the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament . Among other things, they would not have requested reinforcements; the information policy of the police authority was bad. After a meeting of the Bundestag interior committee in Berlin on January 13, 2016, Jäger repeated his serious allegations and reprimanded the police in Cologne for dealing with the attacks on New Year's Eve.

In mid-January 2016 it became known that several criminal charges were filed against Albers and other police officers because of the attacks on women on New Year's Eve on suspicion of failure to provide assistance .

Publications

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Police President Wolfgang Albers. In: polizei.nrw.de. Cologne police , archived from the original on January 9, 2016 ; accessed on February 4, 2016 (short biography).
  2. ↑ a b c d e Wolfgang Albers becomes the new police chief. In: welt.de . September 20, 2011, accessed January 10, 2016 .
  3. ↑ a b Pascal Beucker , Anja Krüger: "I was always a little scared". In: taz.de . January 2, 2014, accessed on January 10, 2016 (interview with Wolfgang Albers).
  4. ↑ Pascal Beucker : "The Unreasonable One". In: taz.de . January 7, 2016, accessed December 30, 2016 .
  5. ↑ (dab): Albers is the new Bonn police chief. In: general-anzeiger-bonn.de. General-Anzeiger , Bonn, May 23, 2002, accessed on January 13, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Evangelical Church in the Rhineland EKiR.de: Church leadership - Wolfgang Albers. Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, March 5, 2017, accessed on July 24, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Ayla Jacob, Lisa Inhoffen: Wolfgang Albers goes to Cologne. In: general-anzeiger-bonn.de. General-Anzeiger, Bonn, September 21, 2011, accessed on January 10, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Dagmar Blesel: A "Tschö" and a "Glück auf". In: general-anzeiger-bonn.de. General-Anzeiger, Bonn, July 1, 2002, accessed on January 12, 2016 .
  9. ^ Robert Kulka: 1000 officials sort 4.5 kilometers of files. In: general-anzeiger-bonn.de. General-Anzeiger, Bonn, October 17, 2006, accessed on January 12, 2016 .
  10. ↑ Authority management. In: polizei.nrw.de. Police in Bonn , accessed on January 10, 2016 (short biography of Police President Ursula Brohl-Sowa).
  11. ↑ Tobias Blasius: aging! NRW is losing more and more police officers. In: DerWesten.de . June 7, 2015, accessed January 13, 2016 .
  12. ↑ (dpa): 1130 positions: Experts see potential for savings in the police. In: ksta.de. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger , June 9, 2015, accessed on January 13, 2016 .
  13. ↑ a b (dpa / AFP / tan): Police use water cannons - fight at Hogesa. In: welt.de. Die Welt , October 25, 2015, accessed January 7, 2016 .
  14. ↑ Rafael Buschmann, Jörg Diehl: Police in Cologne hooligan riot: surprised, overwhelmed, inferior. In: Spiegel Online . November 19, 2014, accessed January 7, 2016 .
  15. ↑ Jörg Diehl: Cologne SEK affair: special investigator relieves special forces. In: Spiegel Online. October 9, 2015, accessed January 7, 2016 .
  16. ↑ (tor): Police chief replaces the chief of the elite police officers. In: RP Online . September 17, 2015, accessed January 7, 2016 .
  17. ↑ (mas): Bernd Petelkau calls for the resignation of Police President Wolfgang Albers. In: rundschau-online.de. Kölnische Rundschau, June 28, 2015, accessed on January 7, 2016 .
  18. ↑ a b Reiner Burger : That's why Cologne's police chief has to resign. In: FAZ.net . January 8, 2016, accessed January 12, 2016 .
  19. ↑ spiegel.de
  20. ↑ Tobias Blasius: Jäger sends Cologne's police chief into retirement. In: DerWesten.de . January 9, 2016, accessed January 12, 2016 .
  21. ↑ Ministry of the Interior and Local Affairs of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MIK NRW): Cologne police must regain trust and the ability to act. (No longer available online.) In: mik.nrw.de. January 8, 2016, archived from the original on January 8, 2016 ; accessed on January 8, 2016 (press release). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mik.nrw.de
  22. ↑ (as / dpa / Reuters): Attacks on New Year's Eve: Minister Jäger accuses Cologne police of serious errors. In: Spiegel Online . January 11, 2016, accessed January 16, 2016 .
  23. ↑ (ala / dpa): Cologne attacks: NRW interior minister Jäger exculpates police officers. In: Spiegel Online . January 13, 2016, accessed January 16, 2016 .
  24. ↑ (wit / dpa / AFP): New Year's attacks: Several criminal charges against the Cologne police. In: Spiegel Online . January 13, 2016, accessed January 16, 2016 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ In the meantime, the police in the independent city of Leverkusen are subordinate to the Cologne Police Headquarters .
personal data
SURNAME Albers, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and police president (Bonn, Cologne)
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich , Germany