Today and tomorrow (24th/ 25th February) once again representatives from a variety of police structures, from the companies arming them and from politics will meet in order to optimize the European police work. Press is strongly resricted (source in German). Some of the topics of this police state’s meeting are going to be the cooperation of public and private security agencies, standards for foreign assignments, armament, data evaluation, expansion of CCTV in public spaces, preventive policing and counterinsurgency (congress programme).
In our point of view the European police states are already way to well equipped. Surveillance is omnipresent, whether on the street or in the web. Our data is in no way protected – on the contrary, it’s being spied out and evaluated en masse. The apparatus for counterinsurgency is already connected worldwide. Beyond our horizon Frontex preys upon humans and inside Europe racist police controls and deportations to certain death are a part of everyday life. The borders around Fortress Europe are more insurmountable than ever and in the interior the control apparatus is developed further on. Already, police and private securitiy guards take common action against activists, and on the congress they are going to discuss how to even intensify this role of the state as a henchman for private repression interests.
Most cynically the image of the police most people in Germany still have in their minds is the idea of “The police, your friend and helper”: Police states are somewhere else, here everything is shiny! On the other hand, most people who think so never had direct contact with the police in a rather crass situation – most of the others were either let down in their needs or know from their own experience, what a police state is. Strangely enough, the German mass media report only most rarely on German police violence (without immediately justifying it), but much more willingly about the repression in, for instance, Russia and China. That is not meant to disavow that the dissidents there live way more dangerously than us. However the public of those countries probably also has way easier access to information on the police violence here than about their own.
We’re out of patience! Way to many experiences of cops and securities controlling, stealing, beating, torturing and murdering, who are hardly ever made accountable for their actions under the “rule of law”, leave nothing from the “friend and helper”-notion than a suppression machinery, that is applauded as so very mild and merciful by all the priviledged profiting from it. Whoever is ready to open their eyes can make their own jedgement.
Some uncomfortables from the struggle on lignite mining and a world enabling it.
You find some music (hip hop) on the same issue and quite persuasive pictures (which might be triggers for people who experienced violence) on this Link.