On the day it became known that the right-wing terrorist NSU was responsible for the murders of nine people with foreign roots living in Germany and not clashes in the “milieu” between foreign families, which the investigators had hastily decided on, things changed for them Police authorities in Germany everything.

From then on they were under surveillance.

And the end of the debate, which deals with the question of whether the police has actually slipped into an institution that is too much guided by stereotypes in its investigations, to the point of criminal offenses in its own ranks, is far from over in sight.

Catherine Iskandar

Responsible editor for the "Rhein-Main" department of the Sunday newspaper.

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In this respect, the book "Tatort Police - Violence, Racism, Lack of Control" appears at the right time. Not because the “Report”, as the publication is subtitled, is suitable as a standard work. Some of the examples shown remain too superficial for that. But it is attempting, and doing so ambitiously, to provide answers to the question that has been asked for several years: How much control do the police need?

What the authors, the two journalists Jan Keuchel and Christina Zühlke, have undertaken in the book is a further step.

Each of the topics mentioned, starting with police violence, racial profiling, right-wing extremist chat content and how such cases can be solved, would have been enough to fill a whole body of critical literature dealing with how far police misconduct can go before it becomes a structural problem.

Sometimes the allegations are blurred

The book is laid out in reports that tell of cases in which officials allegedly or actually abused their power.

The individual episodes are tightly woven.

Victims, witnesses, accused have their say, court documents are quoted, from judgments, studies are repeatedly presented, such as those by Tobias Singelnstein, the legal scholar and criminologist who presented a much-noticed study on the subject of police violence in 2019.

For years, the authors have researched the cases, collected facts, weighed information.

The reports also work because the means of success of the "true crime" is far from worn out.

Nothing can be as bad as the truth.

Apparently, this applies not only to capital crimes, but also to cases like this: a geriatric nurse from Venezuela who in broad daylight on the way to work in Berlin accidentally mistaken for a dealer and is dragged off his bike and hit on the street without it then there is a review of the case.

Or the story of a young policewoman who was still in training when a colleague committed physical harm in office, as a court later determined.