Police brutality in Germany: Killing of 16-year-old sparks debate

Four police operations, four deaths. All in one week. Germany is once again discussing police violence and racism. The latest victim was a 16-year-old refugee who was shot with a machine gun.

Was it self-defense or excessive police violence? This is the question many people in Germany are asking after a 16-year-old from Senegal was shot during a police operation.

The incident took place in the city of Dortmund, in the country's most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). On Monday afternoon, the caretaker of a youth welfare facility called the police for help in dealing with a mentally ill refugee. The caretaker feared that Mohammed D.*, an unaccompanied minor from Senegal, was going to kill himself with a knife.

The police arrive and used stun guns and pepper spray — without success. The situation escalated out of control when Mohammed D. threatened the officers with his knife. One of them shot Mohammed at least five times with a semi-automatic machine gun. The boy died in a local hospital shortly thereafter.

Now, the 29-year-old police officer who fired the shots is under investigation, routine procedure any time there is a fatal police shooting.

History of tension

Mohammed's death came on the heels of several other fatal incidents involving police. In the cities of Frankfurt and Cologne, two men also allegedly wielding knives were recently shot dead by police, and in Oer-Erkenschwick a 39-year-old man died after officers used pepper spray on him.

The latest shooting has prompted several protests against police brutality in Dortmund, with demonstrators chanting "murderer, murderer" at the security services.

Mohammed was killed in Dortmund's Nordstadt district, an area that has repeatedly made headlines over allegations of police abuse. Relations between officers and the residents, most of them people of color or immigrants, are extremely tense.

Thomas Feltes, a lawyer who specializes in cases involving the police, told DW that police in Dortmund's Nordstadtare not known for their sensitivity to minorities. Racist police stops and questioning are the order of the day there, he said.

Police training in need of reform

Asked whether the outcome would have been the same if the victim had been a white German, Feltes declined to speculate. However, he said it was worth noting that issues in communication arose with a victim who spoke no German and officers who spoke only German and that the incident "fits into a pattern that the police in Nordstadt are repeatedly accused of."

Police still have far to go in the fight against racism and antisemitism, and not only in Dortmund. According to new research by the Integration media service, these topics are rarely covered in police training. So far, the only German states to have conducted independent studies on racism amongst police are Berlin, Lower Saxony, and Rhineland-Palatinate.

North Rhine-Westphalia's Interior Minister Herbert Reul, a member of the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), has so far dismissed claims that the police acted improperly. He said that the use of firearms is quite common when threatening situations escalate, which was true in this case because the boy was running towards the barricaded police.

"It became threatening," Reul said, "and then one of the officers fired shots from a distance to prevent harm to the others."

Lawmakers question police response

Michael Maatz, the deputy chairman of the NRW police union, told DW that he thinks people underestimate the threat during knife attacks. If the perpetrator hits an artery, he said, you can bleed to death almost immediately. Maatz appealed for understanding that officers "have to decide within seconds how to stop such an attack" and the firearms were only "a last resort," after all other methods to de-escalate a situation had been expended.

Some lawmakers, however, have questioned whether this procedure was followed. Nicole Gohlke, the deputy spokeswoman for the socialist Left Party in Germany's federal parliament, wrote on Twitter that it was not explicable how "the 11 police officers present did not succeed in taking a 16-year-old into custody without him being killed."

Police not trained to handle the mentally ill

Verena Schäffer, the leader of the Green Party's parliamentary group in NRW, told the media that she was shocked by the death of the teenager, who had fled to Germany "to have a safe future here."

Criminologist Rafael Behr of the Hamburg Police Academy called the incident "unusual." Although a submachine gun is a normal piece of equipment found in police cars, he said, they are only intended for "absolutely exceptional cases."

Thomas Feltes flatly condemned the police response as disproportionate. "The teenager did have a knife, but you can't use that to hurt a lot of people in a short time. Especially since the scene of the crime was in an uncrowded area, where only the eleven police officers and the youth were present," he said. The lawyer added that the police should have exercised restraint and worked to de-escalate the situation.

Feltes downplayed, however, the idea that the multiple deaths in recent weeks were something out of the ordinary, saying that police in Germany kill about 20 people a year.

The real problem, Feltes said, is that police are not properly trained in dealing with mentally ill people who may become dangerous to themselves or others. Officers end up "not knowing how to help other than to shoot," especially if they have not reacted to pepper spray or stun guns the way people are expected to.

"For some mentally ill people, it's more of a signal that they're under a massive attack, and they may feel they have to defend themselves against that," Feltes explained.

The integrity of investigations questioned

The German Lawyers Association (DAV), among others, is demanding that the events surrounding the boy's killing be thoroughly investigated. There are already complaints that the official investigation is compromised because the Dortmund police are investigating the death in Oer-Erkenschwick, which is under the jurisdiction of the city of Recklinghausen. Recklinghausen, in turn, has been tasked with investigating the incident in Dortmund.

The reason for this seeming conflict of interest is that in such cases, who investigates who is a fixed cooperative arrangement. Recklinghausen is always responsible for Dortmund and vice versa.

Aladin El-Mafaalani, an academic who studies migration in Germany, suggested on Twitter that this arrangement does little to promote trust in the outcome of the investigations.

Feltes said that it was "politically extremely clumsy to handle it this way," adding that it would be better to have the state Criminal Police Office or Interior Ministry handle the probes.

His suggestion: the investigations should be conducted by the State Criminal Police Office or a special department of the Ministry of the Interior.

Rafael Behr, the criminologist, suggested using an external, independent commissioner that is not part of the police hierarchy. However, such a body does not exist in Germany.