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At lest in Germany the police still uses them to justify random searches. I haven’t been affected by that since I’m quite white (even though I live in one of th
by arrrg 13y ago
At lest in Germany the police still uses them to justify random searches. I haven’t been affected by that since I’m quite white (even though I live in one of those zones where the police can more easily search me). In the train and train stations police seems always laser-focused on inconveniencing brown and other strange looking people. They are masters at racial profiling.
For white people those open borders are quite nice and quite open in every sense of the word. The outside borders of the EU are for aggressively and inhumanly keeping people out.
Ok, if you are young, alone and in a train from the Netherlands to Germany (or in similar suspicious places) you might get searched for drugs but that’s about it. And even then those searches are quite random and don’t happen very often.
But the rampant racial profiling sucks. (One example of why that is the case and obviously unfair: I can be lazy and late and show up at the train station three minutes before my train leaves. I do that regularly. No problem practically every time. The police never once in my life stopped me. And whenever I did see them stop someone in the train station those people had one thing in common: they were not white. If I were brown I would have to think twice about arriving so late and hope that the police doesn’t see me.)
- solistice 13y ago"white" people are stopped as well, albeit most likely not as often. I have a friend who's more German than the Bundestag, who was once stopped and screened randombly by a customs official whilst he was running to catch his bus. Tough luck.
- kleiba 13y agoThe police are not allowed to only check people that meet a certain racial pattern, so they usually add some white people in the mix just to give the appearance of randomness. Mind you, though, I find that the security checks at a German aiport are heaps more comfortable and relaxed than anything I've experienced at any American aiport I've been.
- arrrg 13y agoYeah, it’s possible, obviously. Especially if you are young and alone and look a certain way – but the way the German police does racial profiling is very obvious. And since I’m white and apparently look harmless to the police they just completely ignore me. I just don’t really have to worry about this. Ok, maybe the police will stop me the next time I’m in a train station and I will miss my train – but who cares? That would still be a very rare event for me. In practice I don’t even have to think about it. Something I’m pretty sure wouldn’t be the case if I looked differently. During the last 25 years of my life I had exactly two run-ins with the police, one traffic stop (all I had to say that I didn’t drink any alcohol and they let me drive on – I didn’t even have to leave the car) and one time I was jaywalking (the police was hiding right at the pedestrian crossing, I had to pay a €5 fine).