The interior ministry of the Senate of Berlin, one of the ten ministries that exist within the executive body governing the city of Berlin, has quietly banned police officers from recording whether suspects of murder, manslaughter, rape, sexual assault, or other crimes of brutality have migration backgrounds.
The feature that allowed police investigators to report whether a criminal suspect has a foreign background was disabled in early August after the interior ministry of the Senate, which is controlled by the Linke-SPD-Grüne coalition, decreed in July that “the recording of the migration background is to be discontinued at the earliest possible date,” ending a practice that had been in place since 2011, BZ Die Stimme Berlins reports.
In an attempt to justify the decree, the Berlin Senate said that mentions of a suspect’s migrant background were not used for preventative measures or other legal tasks, and as a result, the collection of this personal data violated data protection.
The Gewerkschaft der Polizei (Trade Union of the Police) has sharply criticized the Senate’s decision. GdP spokesman Bjemain Jendro said: “Such misconceived tolerance is wind in the mills of right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists.”
“But we are talking about people whose families sometimes have a connection to countries where patriarchal structures prevail and where there is a nostalgic image of women that contradicts that of the democratic constitutional state,” Jendro added.
The decision taken by the Senate of Berlin comes two years after figures released by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) revealed that nearly two women in Germany are gang raped per day, with foreigners, despite making up 19% of the population, accounting for nearly half of all rape suspects.
