Bernd Bürger

Dr. Bernd Bürger has served with the Bavarian Police since 1997 and holds the rank of Colonel. He is a pracademic: a practitioner with an academic foundation. After qualifying as a Diplom-Verwaltungswirt (FH), he completed two master's degrees, in Criminology and Police Science at Ruhr University Bochum (2010) and in Public Administration and Police Management at the German Police University (2013). In 2015 he earned his doctorate with a thesis on shift-work models in operational patrol service.

For more than eleven years he served with the Unterstützungskommando (USK) Dachau, a public-order and arrest unit of the Bavarian Police, moving from frontline officer to command level. From 2015 to 2020 he commanded the unit and was deployed at the flashpoints of major operations, including the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg. At the G7 summits of 2015 and 2022 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen he served as operational commander for the protest camp and its spontaneous demonstrations. Since 2020 he has headed the department for Leadership and Operations at the Bavarian Police Training Institute in Ainring.

Internationally he is a sought-after speaker and keynote presenter on public order policing and on positive leadership. He has spoken at the IACP Annual Meeting 2018 in Orlando, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police public-order workshop in Ottawa (2019), and CEPOL workshops in Lisbon and Budapest. In 2025 he delivered keynotes for the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA) in Texas and at the Event Safety Institute in Amersfoort. On the Master of Science in Policing (MScP) at Canterbury Christ Church University he leads the "Public Order Policing" module.

He has been a certified PERMA-Lead® consultant since 2024 and an Advanced PERMA-Lead® Consultant since 2025. In his books he brings both sides together: nearly 30 years on the job and the current research on positive leadership.