According to research by the media service Integration, there is a lack of structural measures against racism and antisemitism in the police force in almost all federal states. The topics come up little or not at all in police training, said the head of the media service, Mehmet Ata, on Thursday in Berlin after evaluating a survey of all federal and state interior authorities.
So far, independent racism studies have only been conducted in the three federal states of Berlin, Lower Saxony and Rhineland-Palatinate. One is planned in Thuringia, in Hamburg it will be blocked by the police unions.
Police training modules, such as those on racial profiling, have so far only been available in five federal states, including Berlin, Saarland and Thuringia, said Ata. In Saxony-Anhalt and Baden-Württemberg there are corresponding modules only for the higher service. In the other eleven federal states and in the federal police, possible racism is not part of the training.
Also in the further police career there are no mandatory training courses on the topics of racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsyism in the federal states. They are either voluntary, as in Brandenburg, Hamburg, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony and Thuringia, or only for managers, as in Bavaria and Saarland.
The lack of independent police complaints offices is also criticized. So far, these have only existed in Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, Bremen, Hesse (under construction), Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Rhineland-Palatinate and Schleswig-Holstein. North Rhine-Westphalia is planning a complaints office that is based in the state parliament. The media service also complains that there are no anti-discrimination officers except in Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein and at the police headquarters in Frankfurt am Main.
The SPD member of the Bundestag Sebastian Fiedler considers the survey to be only partially meaningful. Just because a module does not have a corresponding title does not mean that the topic is left out of police training, said the former chief inspector and long-time chairman of the Association of German Criminal Investigators: “There are important initiatives that were not asked about during the research.” For example, the Federal Criminal Police Office has developed its own set of values.
Fiedler also emphasized that one should not only concentrate on official business in the security authorities, but also have an eye on what is happening around the authorities. It’s about making the security authorities more resilient: “To do this, we have to see through and include the strategies of the right and conspiracy extremists.”
