Even before the Dortmund case, the police set up a working group that deals with insults and threats against officials. There it is about cases in which police officers are suddenly pilloried by video snippets on the Internet.
Düsseldorf (dpa / lnw) - The North Rhine-Westphalian police have set up a state working group (LAG) against officials because of so-called shitstorms. According to the police staff magazine "Streife", officials are also present as experts who have themselves become victims of escalating debates on the Internet.
The working group with the unwieldy title "Affects of identifiable police officers after operations with a large reach in social media" has 24 members. According to "Streife", they should deal with the "growing problem of video snippets of supposedly overly tough police operations wafting through social media".
The work of the committee is overshadowed by a current case that does not fit into the grid: So far, there are no published eyewitness videos of the deadly police shots against a 16-year-old refugee in Dortmund - but there is a suspicion that the operation was partly based on could have steered. Five officers are being investigated.
The LAG is keeping an eye on other incidents. For example, in the old town of Düsseldorf in April 2020: a police officer fixed a young person on the ground with his knee on his head, a video snippet was published on Instagram. Comparisons were made with the American George Floyd, who died when he was arrested - because a police officer knelt on his neck for minutes.
The chief inspector from the old town, who - according to regulations - pressed the youth's head to the ground, is also in the working group. In the "Streife" he talks about the time back then: "The mission went great," he thought at first. When the shitstorm raged, he "no longer understood the world," said the police officer. Eventually he even received death threats.
The working group is now to draft guidelines that describe the phenomenon and give recommendations on how the employer should react.
