20260330 Mehr Polizeiübergriffe

More police brutality

The police’s job is to maintain “law and order” ... while upholding the law. Now, the ARD political magazine “Kontraste” and “Der Spiegel” are reporting on research from the University of Bochum indicating that there are at least 12,000 suspected unlawful assaults by police officers each year. That is five times more than are reported. Only 2,000 suspected unlawful assaults by police officers are processed by prosecutors each year. The problem with these proceedings is usually that when a complaint is filed against a police officer, the officer immediately files a counter-complaint, usually accusing the complainant of “resisting law enforcement,” and then it becomes a case of one person’s word against another’s...

We have also already reported on some cases with a political background. For example, the seizure of the “Adenauer SRP+” on its way to a demonstration in Saxony was unlawful. (on our website https://www.a-fsa.de/d/3L1 and at Netzpolitik.org https://netzpolitik.org/2026/polizei-sachsen-beschlagnahmebeschluss-fuer-adenauer-bus-war-rechtswidrig/)

In its latest issue, the Information Center on Militarization (IMI) examines, in particular, the bias of law enforcement agencies at events addressing human rights violations by Israel. Contrary to Germany’s official position supporting a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, Palestinian groups, as well as individuals and organizations expressing solidarity with Palestine, are subject to systematic restrictions on their fundamental democratic rights. Since 2019, at least 766 cases of state repression against Palestine solidarity have been documented in Germany, writes IMI in the linked article (Report: Repression of Palestine Solidarity in Germany).

IMI writes about the Berlin Palestine Congress 2025: A particularly drastic example of the escalation of state repression is the violent police raid and the forced closure of the Palestine Congress in Berlin on April 12, 2024. Several hundred people attended the event, including parliamentarians, academics, and human rights activists. The congress was stormed right at the start by a massive contingent of around 2,500 police officers. Without a prior written order and citing vague allegations of supposedly unconstitutional activities as well as an alleged threat to public order, the venue was forcibly cleared.

We even had to report last year that candidates invited to the event European election campaigners were prevented from entering the country. And once again, courts have since ruled that the ban and the dissolution of the congress were unlawful and that there was no sufficient legal basis for the police measures.

Equally unlawful was the fact that Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter publicly declared in the fall of 2023 that Palestinian demonstrations in Munich were fundamentally prohibited. This then led to the planned pro-Palestine camp in front of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2024 being prevented, without any substantive review or nuanced distinction between actual anti-Semitism and legitimate criticism of Israel’s occupation policy.

We hope that the research group at the University of Bochum will investigate, in one of its upcoming studies, which structures foster such misguided decisions and the resulting police violence.