Brutality Scandals Spark Review of German Police : Justice: Many question the way authorities treat minorities, ask if officers should be better integrated.

A string of police-brutality scandals has prompted wide reconsideration of the way German authorities treat minorities and raised the question whether there might be less racial violence if officers here in Western Europe’s most-populous nation were better integrated.

“I think it’s great--now even the conservative newspapers are putting this issue on the front page,” said Manfred Mahr, a policeman himself and founder of a watchdog group called the Federal Working Group of Critical Police Officers.

Police brutality directed at minorities and foreigners residing in Germany is nothing new, but it has been made sensational in recent months by incidents such as these:

* In Berlin, an entire city police unit was dissolved when it was learned that some members had been harassing residents and buying their own equipment, particularly wooden clubs, which would deliver more punishing blows than the standard-issue rubber clubs.

* In Hannover, a 16-year-old Kurdish youth was fatally shot in the back by an officer while hanging up posters for a banned political group; police say an officer’s side-arm discharged accidentally while the victim fled. But a study showed the gun had been fired from less than a foot away.

* In Berlin, there were 51 reports of unprovoked assaults on Vietnamese curbside cigarette peddlers under investigation as of late August; the peddlers often trade in illegally imported tobacco and are frequent subjects of police sweeps.

* In Bernau, just north of Berlin, seven police were suspended for beating Vietnamese peddlers, including one who claimed a customs official had attempted to rape him.

* In July, the human-rights group Amnesty International pointed to a “clear” rise in the incidence of police brutality in Berlin.

But the case that, more than any other, has brought police misbehavior into the news here has been the resignation of Werner Hackmann, who as interior minister was the top law-and-order figure for the city-state of Hamburg. He left office last week amid criticism over the handling of the police beating of a 44-year-old Senegalese man.

The police in that incident were drunk; the African wound up in the hospital. He said he believes that officers attacked him because he was wearing a “No room for Nazis” sticker on his cap. In May, the officers appeared at a closed internal hearing and were let off with fines.

Initially, Hackmann defended the handling of the case, as he had on occasions when police in Hamburg--a rough-and-tumble port city--were accused of racial violence. But then another officer came forward saying that his colleagues had beaten 11 more foreigners in the basement of a lock-up near Hamburg’s central train station. Hackmann decided to quit.

In doing so, he made the surprising admissions that he was “deeply ashamed” of the police and that violence was rising to unacceptable levels.

“I asked myself whether I should let myself suffer through this any longer, or whether it might be better to resign, and to send out a signal that would wake people up,” he said.

Mahr observed that this “was the first time in German history that an interior minister said, ‘Yes, there is an exaggerated esprit de corps, there is xenophobia within the police, and there are mechanisms that keep the police from being properly controlled.’ This is very important.”

Indeed, Hackmann has sent his wake-up signal. Suddenly, police are on the evening news--not just in the pages of the left-wing press. In Hamburg, authorities suspended 27 officers from one particularly notorious precinct and said they will reopen 120 closed brutality complaints.

Mainstream politicians are now demanding that every officer be issued a name tag--something that until now, only small groups such as Mahr’s had sought. A Hamburg legislative committee is being set up to review police training; at a coming nationwide meeting of state interior ministers, police xenophobia is to be the top agenda item.

Some mainstream politicians have begun calling for the stepped-up integration of police forces in Germany--which tend to be overwhelmingly white--on the assumption that this would increase interracial understanding and reduce racially tinged violence.

Police unions agree that the forces should be more diverse--but because they believe that this will help fight crime in ethnic neighborhoods, not because it will curb brutality.

On the contrary, Mahr said, “a Turkish officer may feel he has to be even more brutal in encounters with Turks, because he knows the other officers will be watching him. We in Germany should learn more about the American experience, and then we’ll learn that greater integration isn’t synonymous with reduced brutality.”