ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the political agenda for policing in two of Germany's biggest cities: Berlin and Cologne. These cities have been selected for comparison because they share a number of characteristics of all metropolises, while at the same time they differ considerably. Berlin is not only the biggest city in Germany, but also the capital of the Federal Republic, and it has the status of a so-called 'city-state'. The chapter explores two central research questions: To what extent can similarities of the political agenda for policing in Berlin and Cologne be explained by the specific patterns of cooperative federalism and to what extent can they be explained by parallel trends, for example the pluralisation of policing and police strategies. It shows that the German political system leads to numerous similarities of policing in both cities: the strong tradition of cooperative federalism.
