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.
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.
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.
Could you tell me how you would have done it? To hold those protesters with a limited amount of policemen?
In this scenario the senior officers in charge should've known this would never work and ordered their men to stand down.
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.
By not holding them. 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.
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.
Edit: My apologies, my memory was vastly wrong. The minimum sentence is six months, not 3 years.
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.
[1] A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel. Most people seem to miss the last half of that sentence.
...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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.