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Photo: Rupert Oberhäuser / IMAGO
Almost every second state government is now researching possible racism in the ranks of its own police force.
This was the result of a survey by SPIEGEL among the interior ministries.
According to this, studies are underway or in the planning stage in seven federal states.
The approach differs in some cases considerably: Baden-Württemberg, Hesse and Hamburg ask for the settings of trainees or active civil servants.
In Lower Saxony, the scientists are pursuing an ethnographic approach: there, sociologists accompany the officers in their work for ten months, for example when recording a crime scene or on patrol duty.
This is how they want to identify risk constellations for discrimination.
In a similar way, Berlin, Rhineland-Palatinate and Thuringia want to have the practice examined in particular.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior has commissioned two studies: A major project deals with possible discrimination in authorities.
Another study called »Megavo« focuses on an online survey of all around 300,000 police members in the federal and state levels.
Experts like the Hamburg police researcher Rafael Behr consider surveys via online questionnaires in this field to be of limited informative value.
"But it is good that research is being carried out at all." A similarly lively scientific occupation with the subject last took place in the 1990s.
The "Megavo" project is controversial because it does not focus on possible resentment, but on the everyday work of the police officers.
Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) had always rejected a study on racism in the police.
He had stopped preparations in his own department - and instead commissioned a study with a different focus.
In the past few years, police officers with right-wing extremist attitudes were repeatedly exposed.
The North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of the Interior recently announced that a suspicion had been confirmed in 53 cases.
According to a management report, there have been around 380 suspected right-wing extremism cases in the federal and state security authorities in recent years.
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