The policeman kneels on the man and hits his head. The scene in Pforzheim has been circulating on the net since the weekend. And once again fueled the debate about police violence.
Pforzheim – A police operation because of a drunk and video recordings of a beating official on the Internet have rekindled the debate about police violence in Germany.
After the incident in Pforzheim, the public prosecutor’s office started investigations into possible bodily harm in the office on Monday. The police union urged restraint, the human rights organization Amnesty International demanded that such cases be investigated as independently as possible. And on the Internet, users sometimes commented more, sometimes less objectively, on their view of things.
According to the police, the reason is that a drunk man is said to have molested passers-by in Pforzheim’s northern city on Saturday and wanted to stop vehicles. When a patrol arrived, the 25-year-old was aggressive. Attempts to calm him down have failed. “Since he posed considerable dangers, he finally had to be taken into custody,” it said. “Because he resisted the measures massively, he had to be brought to the ground and restrained in order to break the resistance.” He attacked the officers and tried to injure them. A policeman was injured and had to stop working.
Since then, video recordings have been making the rounds on the Internet, showing, among other things, how a police officer beats a man who is lying on the ground and fixed. The word “asshole” can also be heard.
As police spokesman Dirk Wagner said on Monday, the man had taken 2.2 per mil, was slightly injured and did not seek medical help. After he was sober, he wanted to apologize to his colleagues for his behavior. Irrespective of this, it is important to investigate the actions of the officials, Wagner told the German press agency. He admitted that the scenes in the video recordings look “brutal”. “If misconduct is found, you have to face the consequences.”
To check that is now the task of another presidium, namely the one in Stuttgart, said a spokesman for the Pforzheim public prosecutor’s office. In this way, neutrality should be preserved. It is not foreseeable until when the investigations will be completed.
It is always difficult when colleagues investigate against colleagues, said the police expert from Amnesty International Germany, Philipp Krüger. Public prosecutors are also often bite resistant because they work with the police in other cases. The greatest possible independence is therefore important, demanded Krüger.
The state chairman of the German Police Union, Ralf Kusterer, warned against hasty judgments: “In many cases, an overall view (…) gives a completely different picture.”
Police violence is an issue again and again in this country, not least due to fatal missions, especially in the USA against blacks. According to Amnesty International’s Krüger, Germany is a long way from the situation there. Nevertheless, there is also a problem with police violence and, above all, education in the Federal Republic of Germany. A large part of the proceedings will be discontinued. dpa
