A police officer in the operations center of the Berlin police (archive photo) Photo: dpa
By Marco Zitzow
It is a complete failure, which is causing horror among our security authorities: According to BILD information, the digital radio of the police failed across Germany at around 2 a.m. tonight.
Means: There was no communication from the operations center to the patrol cars! A security meltdown!
︎ In Hamburg, the failure lasted 17 minutes. Sandra Levgrün, spokeswoman for the Hamburg police: “Work on the network structure was announced and something happened that we don’t know yet, which then led to this failure.”
Police operations were then coordinated using so-called Mobipol devices. These are cell phones that almost every police officer carries with them.
But that’s not all: The fire brigade also had a complete digital radio failure between 2.30 a.m. and 2.35 a.m. There, the so-called telegraph rooms were occupied by firefighters, who could then contact the operations center and their vehicles by telephone and mediate.
Exact extent still unclear
In Lower Saxony, the Ministry of the Interior also confirmed the failure when asked by BILD. In Berlin, the failure was registered between 2:23 a.m. and 2:39 a.m., and police officers in Baden-Württemberg could not be reached via digital radio either.
How the failure came about and how big the exact extent was is currently being investigated. A first suspicion is maintenance work that is said to have been carried out.