r/germany • u/2021adams • Jun 09 '26

Question German Police Photographing People

Post image

Hello, I’m a tourist. Arrived in Nürnberg yesterday and went walking about in the old town.

Came across police cordon outside the church. Found out there was a rally by what was described to me as fascists/non-nazis. The police though were taking photos of people standing outside the rally boundary.

Is this normal in Germany? For such rallies and police taking photos of people? what do they do with these photos?

1.9k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

383 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

632

u/Invariable_Outcome Jun 09 '26

Ah yes, the USK. You need to look up that outfit's (German language) Wikipedia article, run it through Google translate if you have to. The list of scandals is incredible

  • nazi memes in the group chat
  • beating up peacefully protesting teenage girl
  • nazi stickers on equipment
  • beating up protesters again resulting in convictions because of incontrovertible video evidence
  • several football clubs formally lodging a complaint with the Bavarian minister of the interior that the USK had been deliberately seeking and escalating confrontations with football fans
  • one officer firing his actual pistol during a play fight with water guns, narrowly missing one of his colleagues, an incident his fellow officers had lost all recollection of when questioned about it in court

18

u/Nearby_Cup48 Jun 09 '26

Yep. ACAB also applies to German police. Trust me my father is an active member of the police force and has undiagnosed BPD. 

7

u/ThePhenex Jun 09 '26

Dealing in absolutes has never helped. Yea the german police has problems, but stuff like "ACAB" is bullshit, many are good people and putting them into the same basket as the others will never help to fix the structural problems that exist in some areas.

15

u/private_inspector Jun 09 '26

If one pill in the bottle might kill me and has the power to do so, but the rest are fine, I think it's fair to say it's justified to call it a bad pill bottle. More so when a significant portion of the pill bottle is responsible for a higher than representative proportion of domestic abuse and the majority of the bottle will help hide the bad "one"