2024 - Shortage of personnel - Basel police want to look for missing personnel in Germany

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The Basel police have not filled many positions. Now she wants to employ people who live in nearby Germany.

To maintain security and order, can and should the cantonal police employ people who do not have a Swiss passport and do not live in Switzerland? This is the question that concerns the Basel city police in view of the deep gaps in the corps: 92 of 700 positions are not filled, and recruiting has been slow for years.

In the long term, this understocking is a major burden; we have to remedy this.

For Toprak Yerguz, spokesman for the Basel City Justice and Security Department (JSD), the need for action is clear: “In the long term, this shortage will be a major burden, especially for the remaining police officers in the corps, and therefore we have to remedy the situation.”

Migration to other police corps

The president of the cantonal police officers’ association, Pascal Eisner, warns: “This situation means that more and more employees are dissatisfied and cannot or do not want to deal with the overload and are looking for other corps. That leads to churn.” This makes the situation worse.

For Yerguz, the pressure is now so great that cross-border recruitment should be clarified very soon. He expects a decision within a few months, not years.

Legend:

Police work in Basel is rarely as peaceful as at Carnival. Many demonstrations, fights against crime and violence at football games put a strain on corps members.

Keystone / Urs Flueler

The authorities gave job seekers the idea: Many people living in Germany have applied recently, explains Yerguz. A working group is now clarifying whether and how the legal requirements can be interpreted in such a way that the police can also employ foreigners who do not live in Switzerland in the future. This was made public by the “Basler Zeitung”.

The step would amount to a paradigm shift: in most cantons you can only become a police officer with a Swiss passport. Basel-Stadt, on the other hand, has been employing people from Branch C since the late 1990s. Only a few cantons are currently dealing with it, such as Schwyz, Neuchâtel, Graubünden, Geneva and Jura.

Basel-Stadt is a special and borderline case in Switzerland: around two thirds of the immediate geographical neighborhood is abroad, specifically Alsace and southern Baden. Tram lines run via Basel’s market square to Saint-Louis and Weil am Rhein. In everyday life, Basel is closely connected to its neighbors, including tens of thousands of commuters from both countries, especially because of the prosperous pharmaceutical industry.

The proportion of foreigners in the Basel city resident population was almost 38 percent at the end of 2022, and the trend is rising. One of the aims of the police is to employ foreigners with settlement permit C to represent the entire resident population in the corps.

For the sake of simplicity, Basel-Stadt used the C settlement permit as a condition of employment, explains Yerguz. This means that applicants would probably have a connection to Basel and Switzerland. “But someone who, for example, grew up in neighboring Lörrach and perhaps already worked in Basel-Stadt but simply didn’t live here, of course also has a close relationship.” It would therefore be possible to employ such cross-border commuters if the police law were interpreted a little more generously.

This is a ray of hope for the police officers’ association: “This is an urgently needed and sensible way to increase staffing levels,” says Eisner. It is important to give those affected good instructions.