"Procedures outside the stadiums and in the parking areas still need to be optimized, for example so that emergency medical services can leave the grounds on their way to the hospital faster"
About this Quote
A bureaucrat’s sentence, yes, but it’s doing something quietly political: converting the chaos of mass events into a solvable engineering problem. Otto Schily isn’t reaching for soaring rhetoric. He’s staking out credibility in the only currency modern public administration reliably has - procedure. “Still need to be optimized” is the tell. It admits deficiency without confessing failure, a calibrated phrase that signals competence while sidestepping blame. No villain, no scandal, just an ongoing process in which the state is always almost finished improving itself.
The concrete example - ambulances trying to exit stadium grounds - forces the abstraction to land in the body. You can hear the siren stuck behind traffic cones and poorly placed barriers. Schily’s intent is partly technocratic (fix the bottleneck), partly reputational (show the public someone is thinking about worst-case scenarios), and partly preemptive. Talk about emergency egress and you’re already managing the optics of the next incident: if something goes wrong, the public record will show that officials were “optimizing.”
The subtext is that security isn’t only police presence; it’s logistics. Germany’s late-20th/early-21st-century security culture, especially around high-density gatherings, learned to treat safety as a system: routes, gates, radio protocols, lines of authority. Stadiums become miniature cities, and the parking lot becomes the real stress test of governance. The sentence sounds modest, but it encodes a serious claim: the state’s legitimacy lives or dies in the mundane details people only notice when someone is bleeding and the exit is blocked.
The concrete example - ambulances trying to exit stadium grounds - forces the abstraction to land in the body. You can hear the siren stuck behind traffic cones and poorly placed barriers. Schily’s intent is partly technocratic (fix the bottleneck), partly reputational (show the public someone is thinking about worst-case scenarios), and partly preemptive. Talk about emergency egress and you’re already managing the optics of the next incident: if something goes wrong, the public record will show that officials were “optimizing.”
The subtext is that security isn’t only police presence; it’s logistics. Germany’s late-20th/early-21st-century security culture, especially around high-density gatherings, learned to treat safety as a system: routes, gates, radio protocols, lines of authority. Stadiums become miniature cities, and the parking lot becomes the real stress test of governance. The sentence sounds modest, but it encodes a serious claim: the state’s legitimacy lives or dies in the mundane details people only notice when someone is bleeding and the exit is blocked.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
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