In 1984, the Friedberg police had a project called "Mixed Patrol", where each German police officer and a soldier of the American military police drovetogether. I had the honor and pleasure of participating in the project. My patrol partner was a sergeant named Seegebarth. Sgt. Seegebarth and I got along very well and we had one thing in common:

We had something against drunk drivers. In the case of the sergeant, it was for personal reasons: One of his best friends had been killed by a drunk driver. I was writing a thesis on drunk driving at the time. In 1984, almost three times as many people were killed by drunk drivers in Germany as were killed by violent crimes. The attitude was widespread at that time, even among quite a few police officers, that it was not so much a question of guilt but rather bad luck if you damaged someone as a drunk driver. So we decided to make this a focus of our patrol activity, especially since we were mostly driving at night. I remember a car chase between Dorheim and Wölfersheim. in which the drunk driver fortunately gave up before anything happened. In the case of criminal proceedings against members of the U.S. military, certain peculiarities had to be taken into account, which was made possible by this cooperation.