On Saturday evening, the police raided the party scene in several North Rhine-Westphalian cities to search for links between criminal family clans and the bouncer scene. 650 police officers were deployed in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg and Gelsenkirchen, said a spokesman for the North Rhine-Westphalian Interior Ministry. The aim was to obtain information about a relatively unknown field of clan crime. NRW Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) was also on site during the raid.
Recently, investigations in the Ruhr region in particular have made it clear that there are repeated links between well-known clan families and companies in the security and guarding industry. There is often a network of subcontractors, letterbox companies and changing shareholders. Investigators suspect that such structures in the bouncer scene serve criminal clans to circumvent regulations and evade taxes. Ultimately, it is about earning money “on a larger scale,” said the spokesman.
The information emerged from the work of the Ruhr Security Conference (Siko). State police, Ruhr area municipalities, customs authorities and federal police have been working together there for four years to combat clan crime in the Ruhr area.
However, investigators have so far lacked precise information about where exactly security companies with clan ties are active. The raid was therefore primarily about shedding light on these structures.
Clan crime
The authorities describe crimes that develop from ethnically isolated subcultures as clan crime. The perpetrators in North Rhine-Westphalia mostly come from large families of Turkish-Arab origin, but according to the police, Syrian clans have recently been playing an increasingly important role. According to the State Criminal Police Office, every fifth case involving organized crime involves connections to family clans. Essen is considered a stronghold.
However, the term clan crime is controversial because, according to critics, it stigmatizes and discriminates against people with a migrant background based solely on their family affiliation and origin.
