On July 1, 2023, I was allowed to start my service at the local office of the Guardia Civil in the Andalusian coastal town of Almeria. After successfully completing the selection process at IM NRW and organizational preparations, I was eagerly awaiting this day. Although I have known the province of Almeria quite well for more than 20 years due to my private visits, I was very excited and curious as I awaited my arrival.
On my first day at work, I got to know the headquarters (Comandancia) through a presentation on the history, development and tasks of the Guardia Civil. The reception by my superiors was characterized by remarkable hospitality and collegiality.
My deployment plan included four Guardia Civil departments:
- Two Guardia Civil posts (police stations),
- Airport and
- seaport
At the last two stations, the Civil Guard is responsible for aviation and shipping security and carries out goods traffic controls (comparable to German customs).
At the beginning of my service, time began to fly by unnoticed. Encounters with colleagues, new tasks, different procedures for dealing with standard police situations - all this made the time pass unnoticed. Boredom - a foreign word!
The use of technology to defend against drones and monitor the maritime border, the search for illegal imports of goods, people and drugs across the Mediterranean - a lot of things were really new to me and unfamiliar in this form from my work in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The almost daily arrivals of rubber dinghies with illegal immigrants from Algeria and Morocco now clearly showed me how important a united Europe, effective border protection and fair and sensible global politics are.
A day at sea with the Guardia Civil patrol boat and the police presence in the bullring will also remain unforgettable moments of my service in Almeria.
Despite all the differences in police work in Spain and Germany, I realized that we have a lot in common in many areas. On my first day at the seaport, I observed the work of my colleagues checking high-value vehicles before they boarded the ferry to Algeria. As one of the things I do in my day-to-day work in Germany is identifying vehicles and dealing with vehicle forfeiture offenses, I knew what they were doing without having spoken a word to my colleagues. The next high-value Audi then became "mine". Now my colleagues were looking in my direction. The next "luxury car" was already being checked together. Curiously, it was only after this inspection that we had our first exchange of views, during which we laughingly realized that we really do "tick in sync" and are actually one-to-one interchangeable. From then on, we formed a team for several days, in which no one was a supervisor and no one was a guest police officer, but all were considered equal colleagues with the same expertise.
Private encounters with colleagues were also part of everyday life and left unforgettable impressions. Soccer, politics, the salaries of civil servants in the respective countries, the times of ETA terrorism with many dead colleagues from the Guardia Civil and many other topics were the subject of unbiased and very interesting discussions.
In summary, I can only express my pleasure at having taken part in the EU project "European Commissariats", which in my experience was a success. It was a real enrichment for me as a police officer and as a person!
