display
Hanover (dpa / lni) - After the decision for a nationwide study on police work, Lower Saxony is sticking to its own investigations.
Interior Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) announced that it would be a matter of entering into the everyday life of the police officers and accompanying their work.
The concept was developed a few weeks ago under the leadership of scientists from the Police Academy and will be continued in the new year.
Saxony-Anhalt had announced participation in the Lower Saxony study, which should also address the question of how so-called “racial profiling” can arise, for example.
After right-wing extremist chat groups were discovered by police officers in several federal states, the SPD interior ministers, together with the police union (GdP), called for a police study to investigate everyday police work.
Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU) initially considered an investigation into this phenomenon by security authorities alone to be wrong and only recently decided to conduct a study on police work as a whole.
"It must not be a question of placing the police under general suspicion," emphasized Minister Pistorius.
"The vast majority of police officers are firmly committed to the constitution and rightly enjoy great trust."
In Lower Saxony there have so far only been isolated cases of extremist behavior.
At the end of the year, several officers from the Osnabrück police were suspected of having shared right-wing extremist content via messenger services, and three officers were temporarily suspended.
display
The aim is not to point the finger at the police, there is no structural racism in the police, said Pistorius of the dpa in Hanover.
"The question is whether the structures in the police have influence on racist views and what can be done about it."
It has already been shown that attitudes have changed in the course of a police career.
In training and among young civil servants, one would not find the same views as among senior officials.
"It tends to build up over the years," said the minister.
It is also necessary to coach civil servants or to change the area of operation, because "anyone who has spent years investigating the same phenomenon, such as drug crime in a certain city, may develop one-dimensional views of certain parts of the population".
The result is an organizational culture that favors an open error culture and an appropriate attitude.
"If someone in the police hears about chat groups in which, for example, misanthropic and extremist pictures and slogans are posted, I expect that he will report that too," explained the minister.
“It has nothing to do with denouncing and sneaking.
Rather, this serves to protect our own organization, the police, and to maintain the trust that people have in them. "
display
With the plan of a study on police work, Pistorius had taken up a demand from the GdP in Lower Saxony.
The coalition partner CDU had positioned itself critically.
He rejects a study that only looks at and stigmatizes a single group of officials, said the CDU member and predecessor of Pistorius, Uwe Schünemann.
Extremists in the ranks of the police had to be identified and taken against them quickly and severely.
In principle, the state would be well advised to look very carefully when the question of border crossings by police officers is in the room, in the interests of the rule of law and the police, the minister emphasized.
Which federal states will participate in the federal study is still open.
Lower Saxony has basically agreed to take part in a federal study in parallel to carrying out its own study, but made this dependent on the exact research concept and design, which the federal states do not currently have.