Earlier this week, Shelby and I were flipping through the TV channels when we came across a program where an older woman was being sternly lectured by two uniformed men for not picking up after her dog! Was this some kind of fictional dramatization -- except for us, it seems that nobody here picks up after their dog. Did German police really have this much free time on their hands? Our interest piqued, we stopped channel-surfing and settled in to watch . . . the Adventures of the Offenbacher Ordungsamt!
The old lady lost her argument with the two officers; they let her off with a warning and a small fine (20 Euro), letting her know that she was risking a 200 Euro penalty if she was caught again. She huffily went back to her house across the street to retrieve a plastic bag and came back to clean up after her crime, glaring at the officers all the while. (You could tell from her clumy two-handed plastic bag technique that this wasn't something she'd had much practice at.)
The camera then followed the men back to their car; from its markings, we found out that they weren't regular police (Polizei), but were instead officers of the city of Offenbach Ordnungsamt -- in a sloppy literal translation, the office of keeping order.
I'd never heard of the Ordnungsamt before, but it quickly became clear these men were in charge of policing minor-league "broken window" public health and safety complaints, so that the "real" police could worry about robbery and murder and the like. For the next hour or so, we rode along with the two officers for one gripping action scene after another: they busted a man for operating an informal, unlicensed sidewalk garage (and more unforgiveably, for leaking oil on the sidewalk!); they stopped by an apartment to investigate a report of a junior-high-age kid missing school (foolishly, he told them he "didn't have to go to school anymore"; one radio call in to the school office, and so much for that lie); they 'convinced' a couple of homeless men in a public park to move along; in the most involved call of the program, they investigated reports of a slum apartment building (it was; when asked about rats, one of the residents held up his hands about three feet apart -- "it was this big . . . with tail!") and inspected the adjoining Chinese restaurant to gauge the likelihood of the rats next door making an visit.
Gripping live-action true-crime TV, as only you'd find in Germany.
(Previous to this, my favorite scene from a German true-crime TV show was a gripping police chase down the Autobahn, to catch someone who'd passed another car on the right! And when they finally pulled the guy over? You guessed it, he was an American.)
Posted by Kevin at March 8, 2004 08:25 AM