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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

While in Germany police are routinely armed with pistols, heavier weapons like MPs are used for serious incidents only, usually. This includes soccer games, and transport to/from those (my main encounters with MP-wielding police officers is when I happen to go to the train station while there’s a local soccer game where others arrive, or one where the fans go to via train)

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In the U.K., they’re a regular fixture (cops with SMGs) - train stations, street corners, shopping centres, supermarkets, the beach, you name it, they’re there, and armed to the teeth. Football match, you’ll have hundreds of them, often pre-emptively in riot gear.

The football always annoyed me. The riot great I can understand, the SMGs are inexcusable. I always felt it was an excuse for the police to bill the club for their most expensive personnel.

AFAIK the club only pay for the police inside the stadium.

Can find anything completely declarative on this subject, but everything I’m seeing suggests you’re right. Football clubs only pay for officers within the stadium, and it’s seems UK case law prevents the police for charging stadiums for officers one public grounds in the surrounding area [1].

There is also an ongoing debate about how policing costs of football matches are funded, given all police forces have seen huge cuts in budgets over the past few years. But equally football matches are much less violent than they used to be, and some question if the police tactics used today are the right approach (police seem to expect the worst, despite evidence suggesting their own tactics might be enabling bad behaviour).

[1] https://www.squirepattonboggs.com/en/insights/publications/2...

MP= machine-pistole = German word for submachine gun (SMG).

And apparently through us, to English:

> The term can also be used to describe a stockless handgun-style submachine gun. The term is a calque of Maschinenpistole, the German word for submachine guns.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_pistol

Didn’t realize it wasn’t as widespread as SMG.

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