Free Republic

A new controversy has broken out in Europe over the use of the so-called "pain grip" by German police. More specifically, it's a restraint technique being used to remove climate change protesters who are blocking roads and otherwise causing chaos in public. A recent viral video showed police using the move on a man who was sitting in front of a bus, ignoring orders to get up. As he's carried onto the sidewalk, you can see his right hand being forced down to put pressure on his wrist. The man can be heard screaming as if he's feeling the worst...

Germany has a problem. For years, politicians and security chiefs rejected the notion of any far-right infiltration of the security services, speaking only of “individual cases.” The idea of networks was dismissed. The superiors of those exposed as extremists were protected. Guns and ammunition disappeared from military stockpiles with no real investigation. The government is now waking up. Cases of far-right extremists in the military and the police, some hoarding weapons and explosives, have multiplied alarmingly. The nation’s top intelligence officials and senior military commanders are moving to confront an issue that has become too dangerous to ignore. The problem...

Research planned to investigate alleged racial profiling by German police forces has been canceled, an Interior Ministry spokesman said on Sunday. According to the Zeit Online news portal, the ministry decided to drop the study, which was in the “conceptual development” stage, and cited Interior Minister Horst Seehofer as saying there is no need. The term “racial profiling” indicates increased targeting of ethnic minorities, most commonly by law enforcement agencies. […] On Sunday, a spokesperson for the Justice Ministry refused to comment on the media report but referred to an earlier statement, which said that the study is an important...

In a bid to fill thousands of new positions this year, Germany’s federal police (Bundespolizei) has lowered requirements for recruits, according to a media report published Monday. The newspapers of the Funke Media Group reported on the changes, noting that physical fitness requirements as well as the language level in exams have been changed. […] For recruits looking to join the “middle-level” of police service, authorities have also “slightly raised” the number of mistakes they are allowed to make in the test in order to still secure a passing grade. Police recruits in this level could go on to provide...

Germany is struggling to deport rejected asylum seekers, the country’s top police chief said on Wednesday. Federal police chief Dieter Romann blamed a lack of pre-deportation facilities for deportations not being carried out. Speaking to Germany’s Funke media group, he said, “there are far too few detention centers in the country.” For the 248,000 foreigners required to be deported, there are just 577 deportation centers for them to be held and processed before leaving the country, Romann told Funke. However, 119,000 of those have been granted a stay of deportation as local authorities see a reason why they cannot currently...

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives will promise to all but eliminate unemployment in Germany by the year 2025 when they announce their 2017 election campaign platform on Monday. Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), will present their platform for the Sept. 24 election on Monday with other already known policies such as income tax cuts worth €15 billion per year and promises to build flats. “A major point is that we’d like to achieve full employment,” Horst Seehofer, CSU chairman and state premier in Bavaria, said on Sunday on his way into a...

Germany on Thursday passed a controversial new law that expands the power of authorities to spy on the content of encrypted message services such as WhatsApp and Skype. Amid the wave of jihadist attacks in Europe, German lawmakers voted in favor of the law designed “to reinforce the effectiveness of criminal procedures”. German investigators will now be able to insert into users’ cellphones and computers spy software (or a “Trojan horse”) to access data in encrypted message services such as popular applications WhatsApp and Skype, including as part of criminal investigations. Up to now, such surveillance tools were not authorized...

Security forces have launched a nationwide anti-terror operation in Germany. Police in the states of Saxony, Bavaria, Saxony-Anhalt and Berlin confirmed that properties have been searched. German anti-terror police carried out a series of pre-dawn raids in the eastern city of Leipzig Wednesday. Regional news portal “Tag24” reported that the operation targeted suspected members of the so-called “Islamic State” (IS), as well as other extremist factions. A police spokesperson in Leipzig said the raids were part of a nationwide anti-terror operation. …

Sixty percent of Germans want more video surveillance in public spaces, according to a new YouGov poll published on Sunday. The public call comes in the wake of the Berlin Christmas market attack. Appearing to support government plans to change the law to allow increased video surveillance, 73 percent of Germans polled supported the idea of having larger police forces. The YouGov survey for the German news agency dpa was carried out days after Tunisian national Anis Amri plowed a truck into a Christmas market, killing 12 people and wounding nearly 50 others. Amri, who was the prime suspect, was...

The head of Germany’s second largest police union has harshly attacked the country’s justice system, after a court in Wuppertal ruled that so-called “sharia police” are legal. Rainer Wendt, head of the German Police Union (DpolG), told the Passauer Neue Presse (PNP) on Wednesday that the German judiciary are far too weak in dealing with known criminals. “These days the full force of the law often means we collect personal details from offenders and the judges let them go free,” said Wendt. …

New figures show just how many more people died in fatal police shooting in the US than Germany last year. According to the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings, 990 people were killed in 2015. In Germany, ten people were killed by police last year, according to a report on Thursday by publishing group Funke Mediengruppe, citing figures from the German Police University. That means that while the population of the US is roughly four times that of Germany, the number of fatal police shootings there is about 100 times greater. …

Germany is preparing to train troops to be deployed within its borders for the first time since World War II amid fears of terrorist attacks. The country’s armed forces will hold joint drills with police early next year, officials confirmed. […] Plans to involve soldiers in counterterrorism operations — and the suggestion troops could also be used to beef up security in public places — have proved controversial in a country only seven decades removed from totalitarian rule that’s still grappling with guilt from the Nazi era. A 2012 constitutional court ruling paved the way for the deployment of the...

Spiraling levels of violent crime perpetrated by immigrants from the Middle East and the Balkans are turning parts of Duisburg, a key German industrial city, into “areas of lawlessness”—areas that are becoming de facto “no-go” zones for police, according to a confidential police report that was leaked to the German news magazine Der Spiegel. The report, produced by the police headquarters of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany (and also the state with the largest Muslim population in Germany), warns that the government is losing control over problem neighborhoods and that the ability of police to maintain public...

Two police officers who were at last week’s Group of Seven (G7) summit in Germany face disciplinary action for playing over the radio an excerpt of a wartime speech by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported. […] Five days before the start of the G7 summit, the officers broadcast via private radios an infamous 1943 speech in which Goebbels asks a large audience gathered in Berlin: “Do you want total war?” …

People from immigrant backgrounds are massively under-represented in Germany’s police forces and security agencies, which are not making enough effort to track the problem, a study published on Monday found. Migration information service Mediendienst Integration asked all 16 state police agencies, the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), the Federal Police and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution about their workers’ origins. Most states do not collect figures on the backgrounds of their entire police forces, and neither do the federal agencies. In the states which do record such figures, numbers were low. […] Rainer Wendt, head of the German...

Police and security services in Germany’s eastern state of Thuringia bungled the hunt for three neo-Nazis, who years later turned out to be the main suspects in a far-right murder spree, according to an official report published Thursday. A panel of lawmakers in the state assembly examined thousands of case files and interviewed dozens of former investigators, concluding that efforts to find the fugitive trio between 1998 and 2003 were a “complete disaster.” “In the best case, the comprehensive failure of many of those involved resulted from simple lack of interest,” the panel said in its 1,895-page report. But so...