Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Mark's avatar

    I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…

  2. A in the UK's avatar
  3. Jonathan Turner's avatar

    I agree with all of this. The threat is really that stark. The only solution is indeed in-class essay exams,…

  4. Craig Duncan's avatar
  5. Ludovic's avatar

    My big problem with LLMs at the present time, apart from being potentially the epitome of Foucault’s panopticon & Big…

  6. A in the UK's avatar

    I’m also at a British university (in a law school) and my sentiments largely align with the author’s. I see…

  7. André Hampshire's avatar

    If one is genuinely uninterested in engaging with non-human interlocutors, it is unclear why one continues to do so—especially while…

More on police brutality in Germany

Brian Leiter

Reader Jonathan Mai writes:

Regarding your interesting post about the brutal police attack on Professor Melamed it might be interesting to share some information on police brutality in Germany.

  1. There's a large amount of unjustified police violence against suspects, mostly with an immigrant background. (There's the still unsolved case of Oury Jalloh who in 2005 burnt to death in a Dessau police station under, to put it mildly, very unclear circumstances.) 
  1. Policemen involved in alleged violent attacks are almost never found guilty in court. There seems to be  a symbiotic relation between executive and judicial powers when it comes to police violence.  
  1. Journalists almost never report critically on the violent incidents. As in the case of Professor Melamed they adopt the police strategy of denying the facts and literally copy the police reports on what supposedly happened.
  1. There's evidence that witnesses and victims to and of violent police crimes are threatened to take back their statement. A milder form of this strategy seems to have been applied to Professor Melamed.

The above points are presented in more detail in a post that also contains a link to a radio broadcast dealing with the same issue (both are in German):

https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Unter-dem-Stiefel-4043782.html

In light of these facts the reaction of the Bonn mayor is also quite typical: Foreground the anti-Semitic attack (which is unacceptable to be sure) and remain silent on the really problematic issues surrounding police violence I pointed out above. The case of Professor Melamed is not an isolated case but part of a very troubling pattern.  

I'm opening comments for those who have more information, useful links (in German or English), etc.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

9 responses to “More on police brutality in Germany”

  1. max65

    Germany reminds me of some countries which have a Janus-faced public persona. The unwanted ones see one face, the foreigners the State is trying to impress see something else entirely. Fassbinder's mid-70s movies, esp. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Satan's Brew are amazing in depicting "how the marginal isn’t marginal at all, but reflects Germany as a whole."

    https://www.thenation.com/article/the-nazis-among-us

    An excerpt about the endless trial that finally ended last week:

    What happened that afternoon in Eisenach, and afterward with the vehicle and other evidence, is the stuff of legend, with a vast array of theories cropping up on the role of the Thuringian police, the involvement of undercover agents in the right-wing scene, and the depth of the neo-Nazi network that aided the trio. To this day, despite years of investigation by a parliamentary committee, independent inquiries, and 400 days of courtroom proceedings, as well as interviews with over 500 witnesses, there is still no clear and straightforward explanation for why and how such a fiasco could have happened—and what steps should be taken to prevent it from happening again.

    Reply
  2. Urs Blaszykowski

    Here's a useful link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
    It suggests that 1093 people were killed by police in the US in 2016. In Germany, the supposedly so brutal police state, the number was closer to 11 people, despite it having 1/4 the US population size. https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/id_81668576/elf-menschen-im-vergangenen-jahr-durch-polizei-getoetet.html.

    Reply
  3. Brian Leiter

    Police killings are but one statistic; Prof. Melamed was not killed, for example. There's no doubt police violence in the US is worse, overall. But that's actually irrelevant to the topic. Think!

    Reply
  4. Matt

    To add to Brian's point, the "police killings" page is especially unuseful here because it makes no distinction between people killed while they are in the midst of shooting at the police (a fairly large %, from my clicking randomly) and people otherwise killed. It is an improvement over older versions, which included people killed in traffic accidents when the person who actually stuck the person killed was someone _fleeing from the police_ and not even the police officer. (People killed in traffic accidents _by the police_ do still seem to be included, though it's not clear they ought to be.) Why does this matter? Because it's more a reflection of the fact that the US has a huge problem with gun violence rather than a police problem _as such_. Because of that, the comparison with Germany isn't easy to make, from the face of the linked article.

    Reply
  5. pete

    German political culture remains curiously wooden and literal-minded on "sensitive" topics as Norman Finkelstein found out during his visit a few years ago:

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2002/11/25/counterfeit-courage-reflections-on-political-correctness-in-germany

    Reply
  6. Urs Blaszykowski

    Thank you very much, Prof. Leiter, for inviting me to think. I am obviously just a humble peasant incapable of serious independent thought, so thank you for setting me straight. What still makes me wonder, however, is if you or anyone else can provide serious statistical data to show that German police brutality is significantly worse than police brutality in other developed countries (other than the US, which is perhaps too far gone to serve as a comparison). Failing that, what is the point of your enquiry, apart from furthering negative stereotypes towards a foreign nation?

    BL: I think this confirms you're correct about being "a humble peasant incapable of serious independent thought."

    Reply
  7. Mark Engleson

    Regarding comment #6, this is a perfect case of whataboutism. You're upset about x? What about y? Even though y is completely beside the point.

    This isn't comparative sociology. The point is there is a problem!

    Reply
  8. tbaker

    The rant of the anti-Semite, Jan Friedrichsen–predictably enough also a Muslim hater–reminded me of an article that throws some light on the phenomenon of Europe being overrun by "muslim migrants":

    The ‘refugee crisis’ was represented by EU political leaders and media as on such a scale that it posed an existential threat to Europe. Let us look at some facts. Around one million people entered the eu in the course of 2015, four-fifths of them through Greece. The figure represents only a tiny fraction of the 50 million uprooted by the Middle East crisis in these past years. For comparison, Lebanon, a country with fewer than 5 million inhabitants, received close to 1 million Syrians, while nearly three million have found sanctuary in Turkey. When we speak of migratory flows, we should also give the figures for ‘regular’ internal movements, such as for work or study, which account for up to 3.8 million individuals; or for the seasonal population movement, more massive, albeit in a different sense, that is tourism. Greece congratulates itself on an exceptional year for tourism, with 25 million visitors entering the country without causing any particular crisis; quite the contrary, their arrival constitutes an essential sector of the economy. Of course, refugees and migrants don’t come for tourism; they want to escape persecution and deprivation or to make a better life and help those left behind. Nevertheless, we may ask why an influx of 1 million people trying to establish themselves in a population of 510 million should supposedly trigger such a crisis. The reality is that there was no 'refugee crisis'…

    https://newleftreview.org/II/110/stathis-kouvelakis-borderland

    Reply
  9. Jonathan Mai

    For those with a taste for statistics, here's one from the German correctiv group. It underscores one of the points I made in my letter: In cases of suspected crimes of violence German policemen are rarely, if ever, judged guilty or are not investigated at all.

    https://correctiv.org/blog/2015/08/20/polizei-ohne-kontrolle/

    For those with a taste of the near past I want to recall the incidents of the G20 summit in Hamburg in the year 2017. Among other notable events there was this one: A peaceful demonstration was violently und ujustifiedly broken up by German policemen. Afterwards a large part of the German press insinuated that the violence came from leftist groups, who repeatedly denied that. There is the as yet unsolved question whether there were agents provocateurs among the prostestants smuggled in by the police to purposefully escalate the situation.

    Here you can find a bundle of links concerning this issue.

    https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=39080#h01

    —–
    KEYWORDS:
    Primary Blog

    Reply

Designed with WordPress