ABSTRACT
Police and politicians stated that this was a ‘well and long prepared large-scale action’ which was directed against ‘the entire terrorist underground’. In recent years the police have developed methods of electronic data-processing for the storage of facts and figures. The mobile police’s omnipresence in person – successor to the traditional police station – makes it possible to keep tabs on the private lives of citizens on a large scale. On occasion of the escape of four women charged with membership in a criminal group from a Berlin prison, the police announced that it no longer considered such a large-scale search appropriate or publicly defendable. The process of development of a police state in the German Federal Republic and West Berlin, as illustrated by several cases, can be considered an example of the process of transformation of liberal constitutional democracy, which can be noticed from the involution of the legislative, executive and judicial branches.
