page_title: Special Deployment Commando
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Special Deployment Commando / History
caption_attribution_description: Landespolizeifest NRW 2013, Dortmund, Datum/Uhrzeit: 13.07.2013 10:38:34
context_page_description: Spezialeinsatzkommandos English: Special Operational Units are police tactical units of each of the 16 German State Police forces. With the Mobile Operational Units and the Negotiation Teams they are part of the police Special Forces of each state.
  Mainly unrecognized by the media and public, the main missions of SEK units are to serve high-risk arrest warrants and to deal with barricaded suspects. Hostage sieges, kidnappings and raids also belong to their missions as well as other scenarios like personal security detail for VIPs or witnesses. Since the 1970s, each SEK has handled several thousand deployments. The front-runner is the SEK of the Berlin Police with up to 500 deployments a year, an average of 1.4 deployments a day.
  The comparable unit of the German Federal Police is the GSG 9.
context_section_description: In 1974, the first SEK unit was raised in police forces of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
  After West and East Germany were unified in 1990, some ex-officers of the Diensteinheit IX in the Volkspolizei were merged into the SEKs after thorough political evaluation procedures, such as with SEK units in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and in Sachsen-Anhalt.
  The SEK received a name change from Sondereinsatzkommando to Spezialeinsatzkommando when it was announced in 2013 because the former is usually associated with Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann (English: Special Operations Group Eichmann), a unit in the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) tasked with overseeing the deportation of Hungary's Jewish residents.
  In 2015, the SEK was called in to intervene in Erfurt, Thuringia after a 48-year-old man barricaded himself in his apartment and acted violently towards emergency medical personnel. An SEK operator was wounded during the raid.
  A Reichsbürgerbewegung supporter was confronted by the police in 2016 in Bavaria with the SEK deployed with one operator shot dead after they were ordered to seize the man's weapons due to being mentally unfit to handle them.
caption: SEK operators raid a hijacked ship during a public exhibition.
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