Society Without Security

Where are the soldiers? The cops? Security? Is it possible? Who's crazy here?

By Paul Raines

June 06, 2006 — CSO —

I've been living in Europe now for going on seven months, and I'm beginning to notice something strange, very strange indeed.

It started about three months ago during a visit to the city of Basle, Switzerland, for a carnival celebration called Fasnacht. I was lost and wanted to ask directions. It was then that I noticed it. It happened by accident, really. I was looking for a particular landmark and thought I'd ask someone who wasn't a tourist and could actually answer my question-like a policeman. But there were none to be found. Nada. Not anywhere. Hmmm, strange, I thought-no police during a major celebration with hundreds of thousands of tourists in the city. Were they on strike? I finally had to ask a salesperson at a news kiosk.

"So, ahem, I, ah, noticed there aren't any police around," I managed in my most affected nonchalant way.

"So?"

"Well, I mean, aren't you concerned with all these tourists?" She looked at me as blankly as the Swiss sheep on the mountainside. "You know," I continued, "There could be more crime with all these transient people coming into the city-like pickpockets, muggings, maybe, heaven forbid, a terrorist incident."

She shrugged. "We don't have those kinds of problems here. Besides, if people are having fun and are well-behaved, then why bother?"

Hmmm, a pre-9/11 attitude if I ever heard one. But apparently she wasn't the only one who thought that way because for the three days I was at the festival, I counted exactly four policemen. My security sense began to tingle.

Now mind you, prior to moving to Europe, I worked for many years in New York. After 9/11, I became used to seeing a phalanx of heavily armed policemen, soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs greet me every day as I commuted into Penn Station. These people were all needed for security-or at least that's what I was told. Didn't Europe have the same terrorist threat? Hadn't there been bombings in Madrid and London? And there in Basle, I had to admit the people were relatively well behaved even if it was a Carnival celebration, but then again they were Swiss-not exactly known for being the party animals of Europe. Maybe it was different in other parts of Europe.

But evidently not. Last month, while I was in the south of France for a week, I drove for hundreds of kilometers throughout the countryside and never once encountered police. Apparently, there was no French equivalent of the Smokey Bears that grace the highways and byways of America with their radar guns and friendly demeanor.

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