police agression: freiheit statt angst

When I was a child, I was always surrounded by police officers.

Not because I grew up in prison, but because my father was working for the state. We lived in an apartment building with many other families of civil servants, and out the five neighbours in our part of the block, three were police-families, all with at least two children.

The policemen were funny and caring people, and as a child, I liked them very much. And I still do. They often had to go away on “missions”, sometimes being unable to tell their families when they would be back. And we would throw a garden party upon their return.

I remember one time when they all suddenly had to go away in the late evening, leaving their wives and children worried. They later told us that they had to search a forest all night for the body of a child.

Now, there are many groups of people – police is one, teachers another, priests a third, and so on. Due to the fact that every group of people consists of people, you will always find a certain percentage with anti-social tendencies, no matter where you look.

For two reasons, I have always had a blind spot regarding policemen, and I already pointed out the first one – I grew up with them, and they were decent people; I even worked with the Bavarian police force for a couple of month during my studies. The second reason is that I met many left radicals on demonstrations (e.g. on the 1st of May demonstrations in Leipzig), who just saw it as a sport to throw rocks at the police. I saw a lot of them being treated rather roughly (and I imagine some of them were trying to sue the police afterwards), but in my opinion it was always correct behavior because it was without exaggerated brutality, and usually after aggressive acts which led or may have led to serious injuries of police officers.

Therefor, for the last years, I didn’t take the reports of unchecked police aggression very serious. And this might have been a wrong thing to do.

Three days ago I was one of 25.000 participants of the demonstration “Freiheit statt Angst” (freedom instead of fear) in Berlin. It was awesome to see so many people protesting – young and old people, supporters of very different political parties, and only very few left radicals. It was a peaceful demonstration, until the police started to make trouble.

Watch seconds 36 to 38 carefully. You can also find the video here in high resolution (250mb).

This video is very important, for several reasons.

(1) This is the first time police agression in Germany has been documented in a quality good enough to clearly identify the officers involved. Without identification, the other group members of the police unit in question have to identify the perpetrator, which they obviously refuse to do.

(2) The video shows a young man in a blue tshirt. We know by now, from statements of himself, many witnesses and several other videos, that he asked a police officer for his ID number, because he wasn’t very happy how this officer had treated a friend of him (elbow into the face of a young woman). He was told to leave the street and move to the side -- he did so, in contrast to some other people. When leaving the street and thereby following the order, he gets attacked from behind. Well, you saw the rest of it.

(3) The police have filed a report about the incident, which can be found here. It is written in German, and can be summed up as a mix of euphimisms and lies – this is already very obvious when you saw the video, but becomes even more obvious when reading what witnesses have to say, and when reading the reaction of the lawyer of the man in the blue shirt as response to the police report.

(4) Last year around 1.500 charges were raised against police officers in Berlin, around 800 of them for bodily harm: zero were convicted. I don’t say that all or many of them were guilty – but it is safe to assume that very probably some were.

(5) This is also a very important lecture about surveillance: none of the 118 cameras installed on the streets of Berlin – run by the police – could prevent this crime, or even help solving it. Neither could the many cameras which were carried by police officers. It was pure luck that we have video footage.
This may seem like a paradox to some: on a demonstration against camera surveillance camera surveillance helps solving a crime. The German newspaper TAZ made an interview with the Chaos Computer Club about this. In one sentence: there is a big difference between a direct and active documenting of a crime on the one hand – nowadays it just takes a few seconds until you can start filming something – and passive, general surveillance without any reason on the other hand.
In London -- the surveillance capital of the world, with more cameras that citizens -- only 1 out of 1.000 cameras helped solving a crime (no camera ever prevented a crime) in the year 2008. It is a fact that money spent on surveillance is wasted money, and should be better used for supporting the police force: 1.000 cameras cannot replace one police officer.

(6) Policemen in Germany neither wear ID numbers nor name plates (just the ID of their unit), which means that they are basically not identifiable (“I was a attacked by a policemen with average height, short hair and blue eyes …”), and even moreso when they have their helmets on. In contrast to this, we citizens must always be identifiable and are not allowed to cover our faces, which is a reason to arrest us.
The governing parties in Berlin have asked for police to carry ID numbers on their uniforms, but this has been refused several times by now. The given reason is that people might find out the connection between the numbers and the names of the police officers, and that this might cause harm to the officers and their families.
Excuse me? The German state has my fingerprints, is collecting whom I phone and when I do it, has hundreds of thousands hours of surveillance footage of innocent citizens, knows what physical and psychological diseases people have et cetera … and the argumentation against ID numbers is that the German police is not able to have list assigning numbers to police officers without the public being able to access this list? I find this argument utterly hilarious.

Pull yourself together and help us identify the police officers who harm the reputation of the German police force. It should be in your interest as well.