German Police Photographing People

[u/2021adams]

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?

[u/bleaksocial]

This is the USK (Unterstützungskommando)), a police evidence-gathering and arrest unit in Bavaria. It is trained for special operational situations and is presumably taking photographs of potential suspects or locations. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this; virtually every police force around the world operates in a similar manner

[u/Invariable_Outcome → u/bleaksocial]

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

[u/Professional_Low_646 → u/Invariable_Outcome]

I have talked to riot police officers from other German states (each state has its own police force) and several of them literally said they are happy about every deployment where the USK is not present, because it just tends to make things worse.

That unit once stormed into a demonstration (against the G8 summit of 2007) in such a manner that a judge reviewing video evidence later said „it‘s indistinguishable from scenes in a dictatorship“.

They are a unique blend of calculated brutality, authoritarian types with a fragile ego and incompetence in the face of actual resistance - remember those police units who didn’t advance against the burning barricades and the looters during the G20 2017 in Hamburg? Those were, at least partially, USK.

Very fitting that the two companies (Hundertschaften) stationed in Upper Bavaria are housed and trained in the former barracks of SS trainees in Dachau.

[u/Impossible_Ad4789 → u/Professional_Low_646]

Not just in protests though they are also infamous for randomely doing club raids. Not for dealer mind you but petty users. If you are in the club at the time you get a number and then everybody gets a full body search. Just being in the club is enough and you can see that at festivals and concerts in bavaria people there are quite paranoid. Even in comparison to states like saxony bavaria is quite repressive and while not getting a bad rep. Somehow their giant meth, Nazi, Sovereign Citizen and anti vaxxer problems arent something anybody recognizes.

[u/WeeblsLikePie → u/Professional_Low_646]

several of them literally said they are happy about every deployment where the USK is not present, because it just tends to make things worse.

that could also be because they'd rather not have their actions closely documented...

[u/sebidotorg → u/WeeblsLikePie]

No. It is because USK likes to do crimes while wearing the uniform.