Germany faces into bitter debate on police racism

Last March, Moroccan-born man Raghad was walking with a friend in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood when he was stopped by a police officer who accused him of being insulting and resisting the officer’s authority.

Raghad remembers being cuffed, brought to a police van where he was tripped up, and falling to the ground. Other officers in the van kneeled on his back, he says; one rested a booted foot on his head. He was threatened with pepper spray and, he says, an officer grabbed his body, remarking: “Nice backside, good muscles.”

Another parted his lips, Raghad added, remarked “nice teeth” and suggested he would be deported back to Morocco.

Last week a Berlin drug store cashier accused a 24-year-old woman of debit card fraud, in front of her son, a friend and a queue of customers.

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“She said someone like me couldn’t have this card as it has a German surname, ‘and you’re black’,” said the customer, identified only as Vanessa H.

The customer produced ID and said she was born in Berlin, but the situation deteriorated. A police officer who was called disputed Vanessa’s version of events, despite corroboration by other customers, and asked: “Can you even speak German? German, difficult language.”

While Vanessa’s story made headlines, Raghad’s did not. It is one of hundreds in a 300-page report, compiled in the last 20 years, by an organisation that documents racist violence carried out by Berlin police.

As tens of thousands of Germans join Black Lives Matter marches each weekend, people of colour in Germany are coming forward with their tales of ordinary, everyday racism.

Those who insist Germany does not have a US-style racism problem have been challenged by prominent figures like tennis legend Boris Becker.

The 52-year-old has has mixed-race children and says racist remarks and behaviour are a weekly reality for them – and for him.

“I’m in permanent dialogue with my children on this ... because I see the hostility and discrimination people with another skin colour have to experience,” he told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Latent racism

When Saskia Esken, left-leaning co-leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), suggested last week there was “latent racism in the ranks of security forces”, she was cheered on by people of colour in Germany. They say racial profiling and random police checks – even on the fringes of Black Lives Matter marches – are part of their daily reality.

But police organisations and conservative politicians denounced Esken’s claim as unacceptable, insulting and with no basis in fact.

It’s impossible to prove or disprove Esken’s claim as no data set exists on the ethnic profiles of people stopped, searched or questioned by police. While Germany’s federal justice ministry says such a study is in the early planning stages, it says no independent ombudsman exists – nor is one planned – to investigate complaints against police.

Honest debate

Germany’s postwar constitution forbids discrimination based on “gender, origin, race, language, homeland and heritage, beliefs, religious or political views”. But a 2018 court ruling suggested skin colour could be used as a criterion for police work if officers “have concrete indications that persons with darker skin incur criminal penalties over-proportionally more often” in a certain area.

Stepping into this conflict zone, Berlin’s left-wing city-state government has presented a new anti-discrimination Bill obliging police to file an annual report detailing the cause, location and ethnicity of everyone arrested, warned or checked. Instead of a person having to prove they were the subject of racial profiling or racist behaviour, Berlin police will now have to justify their actions.

Germany’s police union has attacked the new regulations as a “blanket vote of no confidence in those who do their duty”. Conservative-ruled federal states have vowed to end police co-operation with Berlin unless the Bill is revoked.

For Joachim Kersten, a criminal investigator and sociologist at a police training college, the time has come for honest debate on the issue rather than sweeping accusations or acquittals of police.

“Some 10-15 per cent of German society is xenophobic, racist, misogynist,” he told public broadcaster NDR. “And we must assume this number applies also to the police.”