The Berlin Police is the state police of the city-state of Berlin, Germany. The Berlin Police was founded on 25 March 1809 as the Royal Prussian Police of Berlin, and, by the time of the Revolutions of 1848, the Berlin Police had a strength of just 200 officers, managing 400,000 citizens. After the narrow failure of the revolution, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia created a modern Berlin police force of one colonel, 5 captains, 200 sergeants, and 1,800 officers, including 40 mounted officers. During the November Revolution, the police fell under the control of the far-left USPD, but the government of the Free State of Prussia replaced chief Emil Eichhorn with Social Democrat Eugen Ernst, resulting in the Spartacist uprising of 1919. During the Weimar era, the Berlin Police proved more willing to suppress far-left paramilitaries such as the KPD's Red Front Fighters League rather than the ostensibly more manageable Nazi SA or the DNVP's Der Stahlhelm, as evidenced by the 1929 Blutmai massacre of unarmed KPD members by the police. Amid the rise of Nazism and the Gleichschaltung after 1933, the Nazis dismissed political dissidents and Jews from the police, merged the political police into the Gestapo, and filled the police with SA members. In 1936, the Berlin Police was absorbed into the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo), which segregated Jews and participated in Kristallnacht. The Berlin Police was re-established by the USSR on the end of World War II, and the politiczation of the police led to three-quarters of the force joining the West Berlin police. By 1989, the West Berlin police had 20,000 employees, while the East Berlin police has 12,000 employees. On German reunification in 1989, 1,056 East Berlin police were fired as Stasi collaborators, while 2,000 more retired or resigned on their own. By 2017, the Berlin Police had 25,153 employees and 2,500 cars.
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