3 ms·

What do you mean by limited power? The recent modifications to StGb 113 and 114 are _very_ open in what they describe as an attack on a police officer, which ge

by x3ro 7y ago

What do you mean by limited power? The recent modifications to StGb 113 and 114 are _very_ open in what they describe as an attack on a police officer, which gets you a minimum sentence of 3 years.. Edit: My apologies, my memory was vastly wrong. The minimum sentence is six months, not 3 years.

mk89 7y ago
Did you ever speak to policemen not as a citizen but as a friend? Maybe you would understand that’s a shitty job (because it has to deal mostly with shitty situations) always frowned upon and not even well paid. Why does anyone have to risk anything while going to work? We are not talking about firefighters here dealing with natural disasters. We are talking about people who are regularly laughed at, insulted, sometimes hit, etc. Everyone knows how fragile the German police is today.
- x3ro 7y ago
  What do you mean by fragile? I agree that it's a shit job, but I don't understand how that should make shitty behavior okay. With the power that's given to you as a police officer, the expectation simply must be that you don't misuse that power. Everything else is unacceptable, since you're the person enforcing the law. Who's gonna hold you accountable?
  - mk89 7y ago
    I agree, I am just wondering when power starts to become misused from the legal point of view, because if you put yourself in those shoes you will understand that they are humans like me and you trying to enforce laws upon people that don’t give a damn about those laws. I really don’t doubt that there are bad apples abusing their power, and in some cases it’s really like that, however if you look at the overall, these policemen are often laughed at and insulted, or even hit. And what’s the payment for it? You mentioned that they increased the sentence to 3 years. Sure, when? Considering that prisons are full and that with a good lawyer you can get away with it fast.
    - x3ro 7y ago
      > I am just wondering when power starts to become misused from the legal point of view That is indeed a good question, and one of the reasons why e.g. Amnesty has been telling Germany the second time in a row that we need an external (to the police) oversight of the police, because police oversight by the police hasn't been working very well, since they simply always say it was necessary force given the circumstances. > You mentioned that they increased the sentence to 3 years. Sure, when? The sentence was not increased, the bar for the "very serious case" sentence was lowered. E.g. one part of StGB 113 read before: * Whoever carries a weapon or dangerous item with the intent to use it against a police offer. The last part was simply removed in 2017 [0]. It now reads as: * Whoever carries a weapon or dangerous item. Nowhere is defined what a "dangerous item" might be, so essentially, in the current legal state, if you carry an Umbrella to a demonstration that could be a problem. [0] (German, sorry): https://www.buzer.de/gesetz/6165/al61066-0.htm https://www.buzer.de/gesetz/6165/al61066-0.htm Edit: It should also be mentioned that these cases are most often parole cases. This does not change the fact, though, that having been sentenced with such an offense will inevitably have a very serious impact on your life and employability, and lowering the bar for being sentenced with such an offense can have a serious chilling effect on people being willing to participate in political demonstrations, which I personally believe are an important part of democracy.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      The existence of people who don't respect the law and the police is the whole point of having a police force! Your line of argument sounds like the Monty Python sketch where the soldier wants to leave the army because he might have to fight in a war.
- r3bl 7y ago
  > Why does anyone have to risk anything while going to work? Because it's their fucking job. There are plenty of jobs that don't require you to put your life into danger, and being a police officer isn't one of them. Don't want to risk your life while on a job? Don't get a job that requires you to enforce the rules on those that are not willing to follow the rules. Groundbreaking discovery, I know.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Some people go into jobs because they actually want to make the world a better place. I don’t wish to speak for the average police officer because I have only met two socially, one British one Australian, but I like to think that most apples [1] (police officers) are good, not bad. [1] A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel. Most people seem to miss the last half of that sentence.
    - r3bl 7y ago
      > Some people go into jobs because they actually want to make the world a better place. ...by enforcing the rules upon others? That's not how you make a world a better place. Remaining in status quo is not how society progresses. Pushing those laws, challenging them, and adapting them quickly to the needs of the society today is how society progresses. Police officers are necessary evils. In most of the situations, they do good by enforcing rules that make sense. In some of the situations, they do bad because they're enforcing the rules that prohibit us from progress. How do you change those rules? You challenge them. Doing nothing about climate change does us no good. I know that, you know that, we all know that. Following existing rules isn't gonna change that quickly enough. We need to progress further, and to prove to our lawmakers that there's enough of people interested in making a difference, some of which are willing to sacrifice their own good for the good of the society. At first, you do radical things in order to draw attention to the problem. Once the consensus is reached, the government can prolong it for only so long before people stop obeying its rules. That's when the defense forces start facing a difficult decision. They could either fight to stop the progress, or step the fuck down and let the people do what needs to be done for the things to change. Once they change, they go back to the start and enforce new rules. Those new rules will never be made perfect, so there will always be people that are going to push those boundaries further.
- Zenst 7y ago
  Yes, was talking to one on a bus a year ago, call came thru to the bus driver that children were throwing stones at a bus stop which was 2 stops out. Policeman was like, sorry I can't attend as I have a meeting to go to, which did not go down well with the driver or indeed anybody within earshot. More so, turns out that meeting was a community meeting if anybody wanted to report...any antisocial behaviour. WHich kinda summed up the police in my area - they want to be seen to be doing the job, over actually doing the job. I could list many personal experiences with the police being inept, incompetent, negligent that after over 50 years, I personally lost respect for the police and that still saddens me to this day. What I see happen is you get a new recruit, lots of drive, keen and they get exposed to apathy thru paperwork, over PC mentality and what can only be described as liberal bias. I say that as when you see drug dealers get away with doing their thing and the neibours who suffer them being ignored and dismissed by the police who class these dealers as victims time and time again, the local people loose faith in the police. Even to the stage that people do not pass information to the police as they either ignore that information or worse, pass it onto the criminals with the information of who passed it onto them (yes that has happened a few times as well around my part of London). In short, sure there are many good police, many fine people, but the number of bad eggs really has ruined more than the sum of the parts.
- nebalee 7y ago
  How is having a shitty job a justification to vent your frustration by being unnecessarily violent towards peaceful protestors?
blablabla123 7y ago
StGb 113 is "resistance to state power" (literally translated) and StGb 114 seems to go into the similar direction. If you don't hurt the police, to my knowledge it's legal to run away from them if you don't damage anything/don't do harm to anyone - which might be also a peculiar exception - but maybe also emphasises how smart it is to be non-violent.
- x3ro 7y ago
  Yep the problem is the "hurting" part. A common medium of demonstration in Germany, historically, has been the Sitzblockade (people sitting down blocking eg a road). Now, resisting when the police tries to clear up such a Blockade quickly gets you into stgb art. 113 territory, in the current state of affairs. I expect the same to happen to many of the protesters mentioned in the article. Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying one should attack the police. I'm saying an "attack on the police" should be extremely well defined, since otherwise people can be charged with it for arbitrary transgressions, which effectively scares people away from necessary protests.

by x3ro 7y ago

mk89 7y ago

Did you ever speak to policemen not as a citizen but as a friend? Maybe you would understand that’s a shitty job (because it has to deal mostly with shitty situations) always frowned upon and not even well paid. Why does anyone have to risk anything while going to work? We are not talking about firefighters here dealing with natural disasters. We are talking about people who are regularly laughed at, insulted, sometimes hit, etc. Everyone knows how fragile the German police is today.

x3ro 7y ago
What do you mean by fragile? I agree that it's a shit job, but I don't understand how that should make shitty behavior okay. With the power that's given to you as a police officer, the expectation simply must be that you don't misuse that power. Everything else is unacceptable, since you're the person enforcing the law. Who's gonna hold you accountable?
- mk89 7y ago
  I agree, I am just wondering when power starts to become misused from the legal point of view, because if you put yourself in those shoes you will understand that they are humans like me and you trying to enforce laws upon people that don’t give a damn about those laws. I really don’t doubt that there are bad apples abusing their power, and in some cases it’s really like that, however if you look at the overall, these policemen are often laughed at and insulted, or even hit. And what’s the payment for it? You mentioned that they increased the sentence to 3 years. Sure, when? Considering that prisons are full and that with a good lawyer you can get away with it fast.
  - x3ro 7y ago
    > I am just wondering when power starts to become misused from the legal point of view That is indeed a good question, and one of the reasons why e.g. Amnesty has been telling Germany the second time in a row that we need an external (to the police) oversight of the police, because police oversight by the police hasn't been working very well, since they simply always say it was necessary force given the circumstances. > You mentioned that they increased the sentence to 3 years. Sure, when? The sentence was not increased, the bar for the "very serious case" sentence was lowered. E.g. one part of StGB 113 read before: * Whoever carries a weapon or dangerous item with the intent to use it against a police offer. The last part was simply removed in 2017 [0]. It now reads as: * Whoever carries a weapon or dangerous item. Nowhere is defined what a "dangerous item" might be, so essentially, in the current legal state, if you carry an Umbrella to a demonstration that could be a problem. [0] (German, sorry): https://www.buzer.de/gesetz/6165/al61066-0.htm https://www.buzer.de/gesetz/6165/al61066-0.htm Edit: It should also be mentioned that these cases are most often parole cases. This does not change the fact, though, that having been sentenced with such an offense will inevitably have a very serious impact on your life and employability, and lowering the bar for being sentenced with such an offense can have a serious chilling effect on people being willing to participate in political demonstrations, which I personally believe are an important part of democracy.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    The existence of people who don't respect the law and the police is the whole point of having a police force! Your line of argument sounds like the Monty Python sketch where the soldier wants to leave the army because he might have to fight in a war.
r3bl 7y ago
> Why does anyone have to risk anything while going to work? Because it's their fucking job. There are plenty of jobs that don't require you to put your life into danger, and being a police officer isn't one of them. Don't want to risk your life while on a job? Don't get a job that requires you to enforce the rules on those that are not willing to follow the rules. Groundbreaking discovery, I know.
- ben_w 7y ago
  Some people go into jobs because they actually want to make the world a better place. I don’t wish to speak for the average police officer because I have only met two socially, one British one Australian, but I like to think that most apples [1] (police officers) are good, not bad. [1] A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel. Most people seem to miss the last half of that sentence.
  - r3bl 7y ago
    > Some people go into jobs because they actually want to make the world a better place. ...by enforcing the rules upon others? That's not how you make a world a better place. Remaining in status quo is not how society progresses. Pushing those laws, challenging them, and adapting them quickly to the needs of the society today is how society progresses. Police officers are necessary evils. In most of the situations, they do good by enforcing rules that make sense. In some of the situations, they do bad because they're enforcing the rules that prohibit us from progress. How do you change those rules? You challenge them. Doing nothing about climate change does us no good. I know that, you know that, we all know that. Following existing rules isn't gonna change that quickly enough. We need to progress further, and to prove to our lawmakers that there's enough of people interested in making a difference, some of which are willing to sacrifice their own good for the good of the society. At first, you do radical things in order to draw attention to the problem. Once the consensus is reached, the government can prolong it for only so long before people stop obeying its rules. That's when the defense forces start facing a difficult decision. They could either fight to stop the progress, or step the fuck down and let the people do what needs to be done for the things to change. Once they change, they go back to the start and enforce new rules. Those new rules will never be made perfect, so there will always be people that are going to push those boundaries further.
Zenst 7y ago
Yes, was talking to one on a bus a year ago, call came thru to the bus driver that children were throwing stones at a bus stop which was 2 stops out. Policeman was like, sorry I can't attend as I have a meeting to go to, which did not go down well with the driver or indeed anybody within earshot. More so, turns out that meeting was a community meeting if anybody wanted to report...any antisocial behaviour. WHich kinda summed up the police in my area - they want to be seen to be doing the job, over actually doing the job. I could list many personal experiences with the police being inept, incompetent, negligent that after over 50 years, I personally lost respect for the police and that still saddens me to this day. What I see happen is you get a new recruit, lots of drive, keen and they get exposed to apathy thru paperwork, over PC mentality and what can only be described as liberal bias. I say that as when you see drug dealers get away with doing their thing and the neibours who suffer them being ignored and dismissed by the police who class these dealers as victims time and time again, the local people loose faith in the police. Even to the stage that people do not pass information to the police as they either ignore that information or worse, pass it onto the criminals with the information of who passed it onto them (yes that has happened a few times as well around my part of London). In short, sure there are many good police, many fine people, but the number of bad eggs really has ruined more than the sum of the parts.
nebalee 7y ago
How is having a shitty job a justification to vent your frustration by being unnecessarily violent towards peaceful protestors?

blablabla123 7y ago

StGb 113 is "resistance to state power" (literally translated) and StGb 114 seems to go into the similar direction. If you don't hurt the police, to my knowledge it's legal to run away from them if you don't damage anything/don't do harm to anyone - which might be also a peculiar exception - but maybe also emphasises how smart it is to be non-violent.

x3ro 7y ago
Yep the problem is the "hurting" part. A common medium of demonstration in Germany, historically, has been the Sitzblockade (people sitting down blocking eg a road). Now, resisting when the police tries to clear up such a Blockade quickly gets you into stgb art. 113 territory, in the current state of affairs. I expect the same to happen to many of the protesters mentioned in the article. Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying one should attack the police. I'm saying an "attack on the police" should be extremely well defined, since otherwise people can be charged with it for arbitrary transgressions, which effectively scares people away from necessary protests.