Herbert Reul, Minister of the Interior in North Rhine-Westphalia and especially known for his "zero tolerance" policy against "clan criminality" under which especially people in working-class neighborhoods and not organized lumpen suffer, has presented this week a new leadership strategy of the police in North Rhine-Westphalia. The WDR report on this focuses primarily on points of the new leadership strategy, which is to be about the future prevention of "extremist" i.e. fascist standpoints in the police and more transparency. Thus, in the future, there should be more supervisions, monitoring, employee interviews and coaching in the police forces of the federal state. In addition, the strategy paper addresses issues such as addiction and the recognition of "anti-democratic tendencies" among police officers.
The fact that precisely these points have found their way into the strategy paper and are highlighted by the public press is no coincidence, but can be understood as a direct response to the scandals in the police apparatuses in North Rhine-Westphalia that have recently been coming to light with increasing frequency. Racist chat groups and fascist confessions among the police in North Rhine-Westphalia are becoming more and more frequent. In addition, there are cases of deadly police violence that are so obvious that even Herbert Reul, who puts himself in front of his thugs wherever possible, can no longer find any explanations. All this has led to the fact that the Ministry of the Interior and the local polices come more and more under pressure, if one looks for example at the recent demonstrations in Herford and Dortmund against police violence, where hundreds and thousands combative go on the street and no longer accept that the cops harass, beat and murder workers and especially migrants.
Thus, the 217-page document builds primarily on core concepts such as "fidelity to the constitution," "democratic resilience," "intercultural competence" and "diversity competence," and is aimed primarily at current and future leaders within the police force in NRW. At this point, however, one need have no illusions that this process now means a more "democratic" and "progressive" police force. It is rather an expression of the contradiction between the masses and the repressive apparatuses of the bourgeoisie that is expressed here. Hitler worship and gassing fantasies are heating up the antagonism between the masses and the police more and more, always tearing off the mask of the " citizens in uniform" and "friends and helpers". Between the year 2012 and 2019 alone, violence against police officers in NRW increased by 38 percent to 9241 offenses per year. Such figures should of course be taken with a grain of salt, as the police themselves turn the victims of police violence into perpetrators in situations where they are particularly violent. Nevertheless, this shows a tendency in North Rhine-Westphalia that even the cops can no longer commit crimes against the people without consequences. This tendency is also shown by concrete cases in the recent past in Cologne and Bottrop.
Thus, according to several refugees, on August 9, the police in Cologne attacked two women, including a pregnant woman, and two teenagers with pepper spray, beat them and shot them with stun guns in front of a refugee accommodation during a car check in the Holweide district. The reason for this attack? An allegedly missing German MOT sticker on a car. For one of the police officers, this operation ended with serious injuries in hospital. During the confrontation, the two youths, 14 and 17 years old, together with the two women, allegedly inflicted a fracture of the cheekbone, a fracture of the nose, a fracture of the eye socket and another shoulder injury on one of the policemen. Only with the support of called in forces and the use of pepper spray, tasers and blows could the resistance of the four fugitives be broken. It does not need investigative research but only a look at the events of the last weeks to realize that such an operation, is part of the systematic, racist control and violence tactics that the police in NRW use again and again against workers from the poorest sections of our class. In Bottrop, the police were called on August 20 because of a disturbance. Following a warning, the police officers wanted to use force to remove the music system of the partying party from a garage. However, the celebrators did not want to allow this, so they tried to close the garage door, which subsequently slammed one of the cops on the head. When the cops then tried to arrest the man, a woman confronted them. Here, too, a policeman had to be hospitalized. Although these cases are primarily individual resistance against police brutality, they show that the revolutionary situation continues to move in uneven development in the FRG as well. Trust in the old state is sinking further and further, and at times even strikes to fight back when the cops go too far.
Another announcement from the Ministry of the Interior in NRW in recent days can also be placed in this context. CDU Minister of the Interior Reul announced that 3,000 new police officers will be hired by September 1, thus fulfilling an important goal in the coalition agreement between the CDU and the Greens in NRW. In order to meet these numbers, a task force was set up at the Ministry of the Interior and a number of minimum requirements were eliminated, for example by lowering the minimum size. Reul is particularly pleased that the number of police officers who will be newly recruited exceeds the number who will be eliminated by a coming retirement. This means that the same number of police officers will not be replaced, but that the police force in NRW will be further expanded and staffed. So in the future there will be even more cops to exercise their terror against the people.
The new police strategy mentioned at the beginning, by the way, has been worked out since September 2019. Only two months after the shooting of Adel B. in Essen Altendorf. A few days before the announcement of this new police strategy, cops again killed two people within 48 hours in the third week of August. In Duisburg, 56-year-old man was shot by cops. He is said to have run towards them with a knife in a stairwell, there are no witnesses other than the cops. What is also remarkable, within a few seconds, the man was first shot with a stun gun and then with live bullets. A threat by a man in a stairwell and an alleged knife, one quickly remembers the case of Adel B. who is also said to have run towards the cops with a knife, according to the police. Only a published video could prove that the police had shot him in a stairwell through a closed door. Meanwhile, the fact that both Tasers and firearms were used within a few seconds parallels the case of Mohammed, who was murdered last August in Dortmund, Germany, where both a Taser gun and five shots from a submachine gun murdered the 16-year-old Senegalese man within one second.A second case of fatal police violence occurred a few hours later in Hagen. There, a 47-year-old man was arrested at 10 p.m. and locked in a cell. Although police say the man had a history of drug-related offenses, he was not tested for alcohol or drugs. By 2:30 a.m., he was lying dead in his cell, according to Hagen police. Prosecutors found no evidence of outside involvement. Another public prosecutor's office in November 2021 also in such a way determined, when the 24-year-old Giorgos Zantiotis is thrown first on the ground by the police Wuppertal and several policemen with their body weight laid down on him when fixing and he later collapsed on the police station and died. Interestingly, the autopsy in question, which did not determine any external influence, was carried out by the Hagen forensic department.
These cases make one thing clear, it does not take fascists in the police apparatuses to unleash a deadly terror against the people. Certain parts of the bourgeoisie, even among the conservative CDU, recognize that the fascist mass movement in the FRG is also spreading among the police. That this happens is only a necessary consequence of the police mission to maintain the ruling order of the bourgeoisie and to suppress the masses more and more in order to guarantee the intensified exploitation and distribution of the burden of the crisis on the shoulders of the people. It is the advancing decomposition of imperialism that necessitates an ever further reactionarization of the bourgeois state, and this is yet taking place in the form of parliamentary democracy.
