It’s quite unusual for a new boss to point out: “I hope we run out of work” when he takes office.
That’s what Stephan Beer actually said when he presented himself to the public this week, and in his case this wish is understandable. “Because we are always concerned with a human life,” as he immediately added. Since the beginning of the month, the 43-year-old has been head of Kommissariat 11 at the Munich criminal police, which is responsible for deliberate homicides, hostage-taking, and kidnapping. In popular parlance: he is the head of the homicide squad.
Stephan Beer is well aware that this is a prestigious position. And the way he presented himself optically, namely tone on tone with a light gray suit, light blue shirt and light gray blue tie, as well as dark blonde glasses growing out of dark blonde hair, he also tried to find the right tone acoustically. In any case, he spoke of “an outstanding job that I treat with respect”.
Stephan Beer is of course realistic enough to suspect that the hope he expressed at the beginning will hardly be fulfilled. Because murder and manslaughter, “that will probably not be the case in a city like Munich,” he says. Even if it prides itself on being the safest big city in Europe and the number of cases is actually comparatively low: In the Corona year 2020, the commissioner’s office was busy with 25 cases, including six committed homicides.
In this respect, Beer initially sees no need for any changes. “That would be blind activism,” he says. He also praises his predecessor Josef Wimmer, 41, who, after four years in office, has now taken over the operations center at the police headquarters in Upper Bavaria South in Rosenheim: “The K11 has been run extremely well.” Beer believes that “there may be little screws” that he can turn, but he wants to see that first. “The next Federal Chancellor will get 100 days,” he says, “and I also take them to look over the shoulder of my colleagues and familiarize myself with the processes.”
After a stint in the crime fighting subdivision, Beer worked in the Ministry of the Interior
The new supervisor of the approximately 30-strong department has so far had nothing to do with murder and manslaughter. But with almost everything else. Born in Munich, he started training with the riot police in Königsbrunn at the age of 18. He was first in the Einsatzhundschaft, then as a patrol officer in the Maxvorstadt.
After a stint in the crime fighting subdivision, he moved to the interior ministry’s police department for three years. He then went through a support program, studied at the police college in Münster-Hiltrup, devoted himself to cyber crime investigations and, most recently, to the further development of case processing at the State Criminal Police Office.
During the funding program, Stephan Beer completed what is known as a leadership test, between September 2016 and March 2017 at the police station 15, where the sexual offenses end up. “Apparently my name stuck in my memory,” he says. Obviously, he even left a lasting impression on Klaus Böhmert, the head of department 1, to which commissariats 11 and 15 are also subordinate. Because Böhmert approached Beer when it came to filling the post.
The fact that Stephan Beer has not come into contact with murders to date obviously does not damage his reputation at the police headquarters in Ettstrasse. There you can hear that his colleagues appreciate his promotion. Beer learned everything from scratch and went through all stations, they acknowledge; he worked his way up, from the so-called middle service to the upper to the higher service. “These are careers that are actually no longer possible nowadays,” says one of Beer’s rise to the criminal council.
The Munich homicide squad has a legendary reputation in the industry because of its almost one hundred percent clearance rate. An open case like the so-called Isar murder on cyclist Domenico L. more than eight years ago is particularly painful. Although there are traces of DNA from the perpetrator, he has not yet been identified. Beer’s predecessors left him this spectacular case. “He is always present”, the new boss has already stated in the two weeks in which he has already looked over the shoulder of his new colleague. Similar to Josef Wimmer when he took office, Stephan Beer promises: “The files will never be closed until we have the perpetrator.” He probably won’t run out of work that quickly.