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Comment by x3ro | Hacker News Reader

One thing to note when reading such reports with quotes the German police, is that the bar for a police officer being "hurt" is ridiculously low in Germany. E.g. if an officer is grabbing your arm, and you try to yank it free, this constitutes "assaulting a police officer" and will go into that number. In past protests the police also reported officers being hurt without qualifying that they had been hurt by other officers employing tear gas against protesters.

Edit: to add at least one source, here's Spiegel Online reporting that the police counted dehydration and circulatory issues as "injured officers" (German unfortunately)

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/...

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> One thing to note when reading such reports with quotes the German police, is that the bar for a police officer being "hurt" is ridiculously low in Germany.

I'm totally okay with it.

One thing to note, at least in Berlin where I live, there's huge contempt and disrespect towards police. Some criminals (calling themselves "protesters") are literally throwing rocks, cobblestones, bottles (or at times Molotov cocktails) at policemen. This is totally despicable and should never be accepted.

At the same time police is heavily underfunded and constrained in their means by ignorant (malevolent?) local government.

Apparently not underfunded enough to watch a wall 24/7 to prevent someone from making an ACAB graffiti.

Yet at the same time the police manages to identify, process and charge said protestors just fine but seems to be absolutely incapable of doing anything about literal nazis openly performing illegal salutes and calling for violence, even if they have it on tape and have police officers present and witnessing.

There's a reason Germans left of center have a disdain for the police and it's obvious why that tends to escalate.

If you're okay with police officers injuring themselves while violently suppressing protestors being counted as "injured by protestors" you should also be fine with the police being held to the same standards. Somehow even if someone dies in police custody the investigations never amount to anything though, and the government is okay with that because the police investigated itself and said the police isn't doing anything wrong.

Wait, is that illegal in Germany? Do Germans not have a right to free speechi

There is no right to free speech in Germany. The constitution protects freedom of opinion and you are allowed to voice your opinion in most cases, but there are restrictions (e.g. demagoguery).

What exactly? I'm not sure if you're low-effort trolling, but the Hitler salute (or more accurately: a number of symbols, salutes and chants related to the government party of the 1930s/1940s) is illegal in Germany, yes.

The US has a fairly unique view on what constitutes "speech" and what forms of it should be protected and to what extent. In the case of Germany, Nazi propaganda is considered equivalent to shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater for obvious historical reasons.

I guess having experienced a fascist dictatorship using carefully crafted speech as propaganda to control its population and erode "reservations" about literally murdering millions of people makes you look at "freeze peach" a bit differently from ... largely doing the same for centuries but getting away with it.

EDIT: I wonder whether I got rate-limited automatically because I mentioned the war or by a moderator. Either way, the fact that I got rate limited while arguing about the limits of free speech and policing seems kind of ironic.

The US also banned books and newspapers (you needed a license to be allowed to publish!) in post-war Germany, along with other acts of denazification.

It sure feels stupid to hear Americans complain about the free speech angle regarding Nazi speech and imagery in Germany, when they were the ones to force it upon Germany.

The Allies would certainly not have accepted a variant of the US Constitution as post-war Germany's constitution.

Thinking about it, can you name a single place where America has been "nation building" in the last 70 years that got something resembling the US Constitution? I can't.

> Thinking about it, can you name a single place where America has been "nation building" in the last 70 years that got something resembling the US Constitution? I can't.

No, but they do get US-style copyright and patent laws - the US isn't shy about exporting those. See e.g. Iraq order 81, which banned re-planting of licensed seeds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Orders

Germany even has an agency (the "Verfassungsschutz") that is explicitly tasked with spying on the political views and activities of political "extremists."

Nominally, this is to prevent the rise of another movement like the Nazis. But ironically, one of the first parties to be banned was one of the only two that had vigorously opposed the Nazis during their rise, the KPD. Nowadays, there are suspicions that the Verfassungsschutz is riddled with far-right sympathizers itself, given how it has handled several cases.

To clarify: historically Germany has been obsessed with left-wing terrorism because we had a domestic terrorist group called the Red Army Faction (RAF) which gained infamy for abducting and murdering a politician in the 70s and also performing several bombings and assassinations against politicians and government officials/institutions all the way into the 1990s.

However the Verfassungsschutz has a terrible track record when it comes to investigating and preventing right-wing attacks e.g. against asylum seekers and immigrants. There have also been several cases of dubious use of informants (at one point it was joked that the far-right party NPD is entirely run by informants) and intentional destruction of records.

Also Verfassungsschutz members have publicly spoken out against the dangers of left-wing extremism while being dismissive about right-wing extremism, the most recent case being the person literally in charge of the organisation who insisted that a video showing a group of people attacking immigrants posted on Twitter was likely fraudulent despite several news outlets vouching for its authenticity and providing fairly exhaustive evidence from their fact checking departments.

On a side-note: in communal politics, the right-of-center "majority party" CDU just formed a coalition with the far-right AfD, which had previously been a taboo and was officially ruled out by the CDU party leadership. So the risk of far-right extremism being normalised is very present and very real right now.

Even on countries with very permissive free speech laws, explicit incitement to commit crimes such as murder is still prohibited. Nazi-ism explicitly called for, promoted and practiced genocide.

In Germany glorifying and promoting Nazi-ism is simply considered equivalent to explicitly calling for and promoting the things Nazi-ism called for and promoted. Hence it is prohibited.

In the US the distinction is drawn on "imminent lawless action." People are free to say or 'incite' whatever they want, unless its likely to lead to "imminent lawless action." And in the precedent on record, imminent is a standard that is not taken lightly.

- "This building should be [unlawfully] burnt down." = legal

- "I've got gas and matches. Let's meet up today and [unlawfully] burn this building down. Who's with me?" = illegal

As for as I know, the USA is the only country that explicitly grants the right to freedom of speech.

Article 50 of the Constitution of the Soviet Union granted its citizens not only freedom of speech, but many more rights than its American counterpart.

Which tells you something about how meaningless the discussion about whether a country explicitly grants this right or not is. Whether there's a piece of paper saying you have freedom of speech tells you nothing about whether you have de-facto freedom of speech.

What an interesting example. I'd never read about this before. The article is [1]:

"In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations. Exercise of these political freedoms is ensured by putting public buildings, streets and squares at the disposal of the working people and their organisations, by broad dissemination of information, and by the opportunity to use the press, television, and radio."

[1] - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Soviet_Un...

True, but having it in your Constitution is an important starting point. Dissidents in USSR weaponized Soviet C. against Soviet administration, just by asking "Where's all the stuff promised here?" And Soviet Union did a lot to prevent its citizens from reading their C. in full (it was notably absent from schools, and public libraries, reviews, and excerpts were offered instead) which suggests these words on paper had some magic power even if absolutely disrespected by the state.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Archive-Auction-Listings/Can-y...

It is illegal in France and Germany to sell certain items.

How do you make the jump from (or, further yet, justify) the use of ridiculous definitions of officer injury, to police funding and police constraint problems or occurrence of violent clashes? Adverse conditions invite malpractice, but doesn't make it justifiable.

Actually, on second read, you're not really justifying one with the other, you're just saying that you sympathize with the German police, which according to you has it bad, and you think that deceptive Police reports are thus tolerable.

To be clear, I'm not providing insight into the main discussion, just saying that your post doesn't read well.

> and you think that deceptive Police reports are thus tolerable.

I'll often cross check reporting with the actual police press releases and the deceptiveness tends to be in the reporting, not the press release. The press release might say something along the lines of "58 officers participated in a police action at the blah-blah protest, where 15 officers and 19 protestors were injured". Then the reporting will become "Blah-blah protestors injured 15 officers". Non sequitur.

> One thing to note when reading such reports with quotes the German police, is that the bar for a police officer being "hurt" is ridiculously low in Germany.

Where would that bar be higher, especially when reporting these numbers in the context of protest deployments?

I don't understand the question?

I'm saying this because such numbers often spark anti-protester sentiment in the rest of the population, and the police is contributing by reporting exaggerated numbers of injured officers.

I did not mean to make a comparison to anywhere else, since I wouldn't know how police reports such numbers in other countries.

Oh, I see. I was just wondering about what the point was tbh.

"Harmed by dehydration" sounded like a useful metric to have internally but if you're getting at the public perception I'd have to clearly agree. Just saw it as more of a lack in good reporting as opposed to actually tracking how people get injured in the first placed.

The police has no reason to release less ambiguous numbers because over-reporting injuries actually works out in their favour by shaping public perception as "police attacked by violent protestors" rather than "police escalating a protest by using violence and protesters then resisting".

Politicians likewise excuse this by saying that there are no reliable reports of misconduct while also only considering reports reliable that are directly sourced from the police.

"Who watches the watchmen?" in this case is "the watchman". Requests for more accountability for police violence was basically shot down with "while there are many accusations of police violence, barely any of them have resulted in convictions".

It doesn't necessarily have to be a conscious move to put the protesters in a bad light: when military historians look at a battle or war, they make very little distinction between casualties from direct enemy action and casualties from bad environmental and supply conditions (e.g. La Grande Armée vs Russia, the famous infographic). You should not do that, apply military metrics to civilian unrest, but I guess it happens. That being said, there are definitely elements in and around German police forces that will jump at every opportunity to put protesters in a bad light.

> It doesn't necessarily have to be a conscious move to put the protesters in a bad light

Sure, but journalists ought to be aware both of deliberate disinformation attempts and of unconscious biases.

Along that line I remember police reported being attacked by protesters with allmost chemical weapons or acid ... which turned out to be soap bubbles.

German police officers have very limited power to do anything at all.

What you mentioned is one sort of loophole they use to be able to “catch” someone: you touched me!

Oh, regarding the policemen trying to hold your arms. Never seen that as a first action, and typically when that happens is a sign that you have actually done something, otherwise they don’t touch you.

https://twitter.com/timluedde/status/1142489729771982850?s=2...

#2: https://twitter.com/oekofuzzi/status/1142719827376857088?s=2...

Update: More Video links.

Power != law.

This policeman risks his job now. If it was in another country, I would laugh it off. Here in Germany this will become a national case.

With all due respect, that is ridiculous. There have been dozens such cases over the last years, with little to no repercussions the police officers. Amnesty international has repeatedly criticised police violence in Germany. This is not a one-off problem.

Fair enough I don’t know all the cases.

Could you tell me how you would have done it? To hold those protesters with a limited amount of policemen?

> Could you tell me how you would have done it? To hold those protesters with a limited amount of policemen?

By not holding them. The right to protest outranks the right to property.

> The right to protest outranks the right to property.

And where is that defined? Your rights don't allow you to deprive someone else of their rights.

Simply don't. Arguing that protestors should not enter the mine "because its dangerous" and beating them up to get them to stop entering doesn't make sense. This is similar to the recent Tweetstorm I read about a woman having a panic attack and the police shouting at her to calm down.

In this scenario the senior officers in charge should've known this would never work and ordered their men to stand down.

>Simply don't. Arguing that protestors should not enter the mine "because its dangerous" and beating them up to get them to stop entering doesn't make sense.

I'm not sure that makes sense either. The level of harm isn't nearly the same -- mines are notoriously life-threatening places. The degree of economic harm isn't nearly the same either.

I can see where you're coming from, but surely you can see how many might consider use of force justified, here.

To add to that, there is no independent agency in Germany that is tasked with investigating police misconduct. All cases are investigated by other policemen.

Exactly how were these policemen supposed to get these people to stop (or even attacking them since they were in the clear minority there), since they aren't using guns?

If you ask me? There is no way without proper preparation. It’s a wide area and it requires hundreds of policemen. So from this point of view, this is the usual “let’s put tape over the holes, and let’s hope the water doesn’t leak”. It’s like releasing software without testing it first, it can work....maybe not :)

So probably by hitting a bit they were trying to achieve fear so that people would not go further? No idea, for me what they did is not violent. At least that’s not how I define abuse of power, but maybe because I come from a country where policemen really do abuse power.

What do you mean by limited power? The recent modifications to StGb 113 and 114 are _very_ open in what they describe as an attack on a police officer, which gets you a minimum sentence of 3 years..

Edit: My apologies, my memory was vastly wrong. The minimum sentence is six months, not 3 years.

Did you ever speak to policemen not as a citizen but as a friend? Maybe you would understand that’s a shitty job (because it has to deal mostly with shitty situations) always frowned upon and not even well paid. Why does anyone have to risk anything while going to work? We are not talking about firefighters here dealing with natural disasters. We are talking about people who are regularly laughed at, insulted, sometimes hit, etc. Everyone knows how fragile the German police is today.

What do you mean by fragile?

I agree that it's a shit job, but I don't understand how that should make shitty behavior okay. With the power that's given to you as a police officer, the expectation simply must be that you don't misuse that power. Everything else is unacceptable, since you're the person enforcing the law. Who's gonna hold you accountable?

I agree, I am just wondering when power starts to become misused from the legal point of view, because if you put yourself in those shoes you will understand that they are humans like me and you trying to enforce laws upon people that don’t give a damn about those laws. I really don’t doubt that there are bad apples abusing their power, and in some cases it’s really like that, however if you look at the overall, these policemen are often laughed at and insulted, or even hit. And what’s the payment for it? You mentioned that they increased the sentence to 3 years. Sure, when? Considering that prisons are full and that with a good lawyer you can get away with it fast.

> I am just wondering when power starts to become misused from the legal point of view

That is indeed a good question, and one of the reasons why e.g. Amnesty has been telling Germany the second time in a row that we need an external (to the police) oversight of the police, because police oversight by the police hasn't been working very well, since they simply always say it was necessary force given the circumstances.

> You mentioned that they increased the sentence to 3 years. Sure, when?

The sentence was not increased, the bar for the "very serious case" sentence was lowered. E.g. one part of StGB 113 read before:

* Whoever carries a weapon or dangerous item with the intent to use it against a police offer.

The last part was simply removed in 2017 [0]. It now reads as:

* Whoever carries a weapon or dangerous item.

Nowhere is defined what a "dangerous item" might be, so essentially, in the current legal state, if you carry an Umbrella to a demonstration that could be a problem.

[0] (German, sorry): https://www.buzer.de/gesetz/6165/al61066-0.htm

Edit: It should also be mentioned that these cases are most often parole cases. This does not change the fact, though, that having been sentenced with such an offense will inevitably have a very serious impact on your life and employability, and lowering the bar for being sentenced with such an offense can have a serious chilling effect on people being willing to participate in political demonstrations, which I personally believe are an important part of democracy.

The existence of people who don't respect the law and the police is the whole point of having a police force! Your line of argument sounds like the Monty Python sketch where the soldier wants to leave the army because he might have to fight in a war.

> Why does anyone have to risk anything while going to work?

Because it's their fucking job. There are plenty of jobs that don't require you to put your life into danger, and being a police officer isn't one of them. Don't want to risk your life while on a job? Don't get a job that requires you to enforce the rules on those that are not willing to follow the rules. Groundbreaking discovery, I know.

Some people go into jobs because they actually want to make the world a better place. I don’t wish to speak for the average police officer because I have only met two socially, one British one Australian, but I like to think that most apples [1] (police officers) are good, not bad.

[1] A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel. Most people seem to miss the last half of that sentence.

> Some people go into jobs because they actually want to make the world a better place.

...by enforcing the rules upon others? That's not how you make a world a better place. Remaining in status quo is not how society progresses.

Pushing those laws, challenging them, and adapting them quickly to the needs of the society today is how society progresses. Police officers are necessary evils. In most of the situations, they do good by enforcing rules that make sense. In some of the situations, they do bad because they're enforcing the rules that prohibit us from progress. How do you change those rules? You challenge them.

Doing nothing about climate change does us no good. I know that, you know that, we all know that. Following existing rules isn't gonna change that quickly enough. We need to progress further, and to prove to our lawmakers that there's enough of people interested in making a difference, some of which are willing to sacrifice their own good for the good of the society. At first, you do radical things in order to draw attention to the problem. Once the consensus is reached, the government can prolong it for only so long before people stop obeying its rules.

That's when the defense forces start facing a difficult decision. They could either fight to stop the progress, or step the fuck down and let the people do what needs to be done for the things to change. Once they change, they go back to the start and enforce new rules. Those new rules will never be made perfect, so there will always be people that are going to push those boundaries further.

> by enforcing the rules upon others?

Yes. If the police do not enforce rules upon others, the rules may as well not exist. If the police selectively selectively enforce the rules upon others, that gives them vastly more power, not less.

> We need to progress further, and to prove to our lawmakers that there's enough of people interested in making a difference, some of which are willing to sacrifice their own good for the good of the society

This is a tangential point. I agree with it, but it isn’t related to the fact that police officers can quite often (I assume even mostly) have an interest more like stopping robbers, thugs, vandals, etc. — you know, the stereotypes that people have of law enforcement.

Yes, was talking to one on a bus a year ago, call came thru to the bus driver that children were throwing stones at a bus stop which was 2 stops out. Policeman was like, sorry I can't attend as I have a meeting to go to, which did not go down well with the driver or indeed anybody within earshot. More so, turns out that meeting was a community meeting if anybody wanted to report...any antisocial behaviour.

WHich kinda summed up the police in my area - they want to be seen to be doing the job, over actually doing the job.

I could list many personal experiences with the police being inept, incompetent, negligent that after over 50 years, I personally lost respect for the police and that still saddens me to this day.

What I see happen is you get a new recruit, lots of drive, keen and they get exposed to apathy thru paperwork, over PC mentality and what can only be described as liberal bias. I say that as when you see drug dealers get away with doing their thing and the neibours who suffer them being ignored and dismissed by the police who class these dealers as victims time and time again, the local people loose faith in the police. Even to the stage that people do not pass information to the police as they either ignore that information or worse, pass it onto the criminals with the information of who passed it onto them (yes that has happened a few times as well around my part of London).

In short, sure there are many good police, many fine people, but the number of bad eggs really has ruined more than the sum of the parts.

How is having a shitty job a justification to vent your frustration by being unnecessarily violent towards peaceful protestors?

StGb 113 is "resistance to state power" (literally translated) and StGb 114 seems to go into the similar direction. If you don't hurt the police, to my knowledge it's legal to run away from them if you don't damage anything/don't do harm to anyone - which might be also a peculiar exception - but maybe also emphasises how smart it is to be non-violent.

Yep the problem is the "hurting" part. A common medium of demonstration in Germany, historically, has been the Sitzblockade (people sitting down blocking eg a road). Now, resisting when the police tries to clear up such a Blockade quickly gets you into stgb art. 113 territory, in the current state of affairs. I expect the same to happen to many of the protesters mentioned in the article.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying one should attack the police. I'm saying an "attack on the police" should be extremely well defined, since otherwise people can be charged with it for arbitrary transgressions, which effectively scares people away from necessary protests.

You're conflating patrol officers with riot officers.

In other words: police at protests or dealing with large crowds behave very differently from police officers alone or in smaller groups dealing with individuals in everyday situations.

The most important factor is that while the latter is mostly a personal exchange between individuals, the former involves tactics and strategies which are largely down to the politics of whatever police is involved.

In some regions the riot police is trained to deescalate and will try to defuse tense situations by maintaining their distance as much as possible and avoiding any forms of violence.

Other regions are notorious for rapid escalation to shut down any potential threat early on even if it means causing injuries and provoking violent responses.

Because of how riot police works in Germany you never entirely know what regional police you'll encounter at a protest, demonstration or large-scale event (e.g. you might be in Cologne and the riot police might be from Dortmund), so usually people are only aware of these differences if they've been at a number of events and have paid attention to what police was involved -- or if they personally know police officers from different regions.

> E.g. if an officer is grabbing your arm, and you try to yank it free, this constitutes "assaulting a police officer" and will go into that number.

Obviously it's at least obstruction of a police officer.

> In past protests the police also reported officers being hurt without qualifying that they had been hurt by other officers employing tear gas against protesters.

> Edit: to add at least one source, here's Spiegel Online reporting that the police counted dehydration and circulatory issues as "injured officers" (German unfortunately)

But they were injured during the police action?

> But they were injured during the police action?

Yes, but to many, it might sound like injuries due to protestors attacking them.

If a police officer is doing something illegal, you are not legally required to comply. Also, Germany in theory has pretty strict laws about what is considered an appropriate level of force (which is why you're considerably less likely to see a German police officer reach for their gun because even drawing the gun is considered a massive escalation and may require them to file paperwork later).

The objection to the reporting isn't that they weren't injured, it's that the numbers are used to portray protestors as violent even when the injuries were the direct result of police violence.

If I punch you in the face and break my hand, it's at least extremely misleading to report that as a fight in which both parties suffered injuries (mostly because "fight" implies you fought back).

If a police officer stops me for speeding and while giving me a fine dies of a heat stroke because it's really hot and they are dehydrated, did I kill that police officer?

Because that seems to be the logic implied here.

No, in that scenario he "died in the line of duty" or something similar to that.

"XY officers were injured during a police action at protest somewhere" doesn't mean the protesters injured them. You (and sometimes journalists) read things into police press releases that just aren't in there.

It's not about me, I know this. But I also know the reactions (and outrage) of the general public, who think "those violent protestors" are at it again, attacking the police.

Intent is not magic. Even if the police intended to "simply provide some numbers" they (!) need to factor in the reaction of the general public and the media, because they are, in part, responsible for upholding democratic values, of which freedom to protest happens to be one.

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