Marcin Wyrwał, a journalist and video reporter for Wiadomości Onet, has called for Poland's police force to be rearmed and better equipped without delay, according to Wiadomości Onet. In his reported argument, the need is not tied solely to the attack in Kraków, though that attack has created an opening to press the government on the issue.
Wyrwał, who is also the author of the book "Psy na ruskich," wrote that the authorities have spent months preparing the public for possible terrorist acts directed from Russia. Should such acts hit civilians, he argued, police officers would be the first line of defence, and their equipment would determine whether they and the wider public survive.
Why it matters
The intervention lands in a charged moment. The attack in Kraków has pushed questions of policing and public safety to the centre of political debate in Poland, and Wyrwał's argument links that immediate event to a longer-running official warning about Russian-directed terrorism. If the government accepts his framing, the practical consequence is budget and procurement pressure on the police, a force whose frontline readiness would be tested first in any attack on the public.
Wyrwał's point is also about sequencing. He does not claim the Kraków attack alone justifies new spending; he presents it as leverage. The underlying case, as he sets it out, rests on months of official messaging about the threat, and on the gap between that messaging and what officers currently carry.
A police officer's public appeal
The call was echoed elsewhere in Polish media. WP Wiadomości reported on a police officer appealing for the formation to be given more equipment, citing patrol cars, weapons and gear among the shortages. That report, appearing alongside Wyrwał's column in the same news cycle, suggests the equipment question is being raised from inside the force as well as from commentators.
Wyrwał's column does not set out a specific list of purchases or a funding figure, and Wiadomości Onet's account gives no detail on current police inventories or on any government response. What it does establish is the shape of his argument: that the state has told the public to expect a certain kind of threat, and that the officers who would meet it first are not, in his view, equipped for it.
The political fight around the Kraków attack
The attack has also become a vehicle for partisan argument. Niezależna reported that Kropiwnicki used the Kraków attack to attack President Nawrocki, with the outlet quoting him saying he must remind his audience of something. wPolityce.pl, covering the same remarks, reported that Kropiwnicki linked the attack to the SAFE loan, a claim the outlet treated with open derision in its headline.
These exchanges sit alongside the policing debate rather than replacing it. They show how quickly the Kraków attack has been drawn into existing disputes between the government and the presidency, and they indicate that any push for police funding will be argued in that same contested space. Wyrwał's column, by contrast, stays on the operational question of what officers carry and what that means when civilians are at risk.
The wider context is the official messaging Wyrwał references. According to his account, the government has for months been conditioning the public to expect possible terrorist acts steered from Russia. That framing matters for the police debate because it shifts the question from ordinary crime-fighting to civil protection under a hostile external actor, a scenario in which, as Wyrwał puts it, officers' kit decides who lives.
Watch for whether the Interior Ministry or police command responds to the calls with concrete procurement commitments, and whether the equipment issue gains traction in parliament as the Kraków investigation proceeds.
