Racist Policing

Overview: Through racist policing practices like racial profiling and designating certain neighborhoods as “dangerous”, racialized and migrantized communities are systematically criminalized. Courts consistently fail to scrutinize or hold law enforcement accountable for such practices, readily accepting police testimonies at face value even when their accounts are unreliable. Further, court observations frequently bring to light how police act in violent or discriminatory ways against racialized persons during controls leading to an arrest or a complaint for a different offense. The fact that policing affects different population groups differently is systematically obscured by the courts, since their own legitimacy is wrapped up in the idea of a supposedly “neutral” legal system.

Racist policing is a structure, not a series of “isolated incidents.” To understand this is to recognize that one of the police’s core functions is to uphold and enforce a social and economic order that demands racist hierarchy. As the theorist and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it: “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.”¹ In our society, the police are tasked with protecting this arrangement, to ensure the smooth functioning of the system. Their work is “domination work”, which means that it affects different population groups differently, depending on how they are positioned within social power relations.² While affluent white subjects can and do rely on the police for protection, racialized, poor, and migrantized subjects, for example, cannot. Their domination is baked into how the system operates. Racism, therefore, is baked into the police’s social function as well as into their operational logic, which is a distinctly differential one.³

One of the primary mechanisms through which racist policing operates is the practice of racial profiling. As the social scientist Vanessa Thompson has detailed, random identity checks based solely on assumed identity violate the German Basic Law (Art. 3 para. 3 GG), the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG), and the prohibition of racial discrimination laid down in the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Convention against Racism.⁴ Nevertheless, affected communities experience these practices routinely, and organizations like KOP (Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt) have documented racial profiling and other instances of racist policing for decades.⁵ One reason why racial profiling persists is that certain police regulations provide loopholes for racial profiling. For instance, identity checks independent of suspicion or cause are permitted in border regions as well as in areas the police designate as so-called “dangerous places” or “crime hotspots.”⁶ In this way, the illegal practice of racial profiling can proceed under a cloak of legitimacy.⁷ In recent years, the racist construct of “clan criminality” has further served to mark racialized communities and businesses as targets for increased surveillance and control.⁸ These practices shape who ends up in court. Racialized and migrantized populations are overpoliced and therefore overcriminalized.

Beyond these structural and systemic features of racist policing, research also shows that racist attitudes permeate police in Germany on an institutional level.⁹ Racist prejudice affects how individual police do their jobs, leading to discriminatory behavior toward suspects as well as aggrieved parties when they are racialized. Racist policing extends also to other actors beyond the institution of the police, which is another point that KOP and their founder Biplab Basu have long emphasized:¹⁰ Jobcenter employees, security guards, schoolteachers, store detectives, and others all engage in racist policing as well when their acts of surveilling, detaining, and/or sanctioning primarily target racialized communities.

Such practices from police and other actors are rarely (if ever) interrogated in court. We observe that judges routinely hold police witnesses in high esteem, placing unusual amounts of trust in their accounts—even when police themselves admit to their testimony being unreliable.¹¹ Judges do not hold police and security personnel accountable for their controlling methods, even when these are suspect.¹² This obscures the context in which a given offense may have taken place and the broader structural dynamics at play. For instance, when someone is tried for an offense alleged to have taken place in an area known to be highly policed, we observe that courts do not interrogate whether an arrest was the result of racial profiling, thereby legitimating and further entrenching the practice of hotspot policing and the racist logic of differential policing this practice facilitates. Procedural decisions like penal orders and fast-track-proceedings without legal counsel systematically enable such practices to go unchecked. Further, we also observe cases where police appear as violent actors or abuse their power in other ways against racialized defendants, some of whom choose to bring this into focus during trials, at times enlisting the support of activist organizations such as ReachOut.¹³

The fact that policing affects different population groups differently—and that these differences are racialized—is systematically obscured by the courts. This is because their own legitimacy is wrapped up in the idea of a supposedly “neutral” legal system. At the same time, convictions fuel rampant racist discourses around so-called “foreigner crime”, alleging that migrants are more prone to criminality than Germans, who are implicitly racialized as white. When the structural problems behind racialized and migrantized people being overcriminalized are thus misrecognized, this feeds a self-reinforcing cycle in which politicians can present more policing and stricter policing as a solution—with foreseeably harmful consequences. In our case archive, we tag cases as structured through racist policing when we observe these differential dynamics unfolding—for example when police, store detectives, or other security personnel appear to draw on racial profiling practices; when victims of racist police violence are construed as perpetrators and held responsible for their efforts to resist; or when police act in violent or discriminatory ways against racialized persons during controls leading to an arrest or a complaint for a different offense.