Malick Gohou says it happened when he was dressed in a dress on the way to work. It happened while walking on the street of his hometown in Heidelberg, Germany, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It happened when he was out of town with friends.
Gohou, 26, says he lost the number of times the police stopped him to check his ID or ask what he was doing, but he estimates it was somewhere from 20 to 30. Last month he must have taken pictures of his face and hands because “a man who fits his description” got hit somewhere.
“I get stopped in situations where I am, ‘This can have nothing to do with my behavior,'” said Gohou, whose father is from Côte d’Ivoire and whose mother is half-German and half-Polish. “This happens once, twice – OK, fine – but after that you’re like, this can no longer be a coincidence.”
Although officially banned in Germany, where within the framework of a million people of Black descent are in Germany, racial profiling is regularly experienced by people of color, according to activists and residents. Protests held in the wake of George Floyd’s death have helped bring the issue to prominence and even resulted in a change in the laws in two cities. Now activists hope that these changes around the country will come into force.
The cities of Berlin and Bremen passed new anti-discrimination legislation in June. In Berlin, people who believe they are victims of racial profiling can now more easily file a complaint against law enforcement with the police who have to prove that they do not trust racial profiling. Previously, the person who filed the complaint was required to prove that they were profiled.
In Bremen, the city’s local politicians have included a ban on racial profiling in the law governing the police. It includes a condition that identity checks are only allowed in limited form, even in areas considered by police as “places of danger” such as train stations, where it is legal to check everyone on ID, even without cause.
For Alliance Hall, these changes may not come soon enough. Sall, 26, the son of a German mother and a Senegalese father, said he had been stopped in the past eight years and even searched by police on some occasions. He often feels outraged by police, especially when he is with a group of white friends.
At a music festival several years ago in Mannheim, next to Heidelberg, he described how police officers asked him for ID, and then took him aside to ask and search for him.
“My friends were allowed to stay back,” Sall said. ‘I keep it up, but I do not understand why it is so. If you challenge the officers about it, they just deny it and then that’s it. What else can you do? ‘
When contacted for comment on these incidents, the Mannheim Police Department said in a statement to NBC News that “skin color, ethnicity or descent principle are irrelevant to police action.”
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German organizations do not collect ethnic data due to the history of the country with the persecution of minorities. Therefore, police departments do not keep statistics on the ethnicity of the people they stop, and there are no reliable figures on how many people of color are stopped by police.
However, in June, the Ministry of Justice announced plans to investigate the scale of racial profiling in policing “to give this phenomenon a factual basis.” Several weeks later, Home Secretary called off the study, saying race profiling is already illegal and can be treated on a case-by-case basis.
“Policing starts with stops and ID’ing, but can also end in death, as in the case of Oury Jalloh,” said Tahir Della, a spokesman for the Initiative for Black People in Germany, an activist organization working as a consultant. acted for the Berlin legislators during the process of passing the new anti-profiling law.
Jalloh, a 36-year-old asylum seeker center from Sierra Leone, died in 2005 in police custody and his death is often cited by activists as an example of racism in law enforcement. Jalloh burned to death in a police cell in Dessau, Saxony-Anhalt, and his body was found with his hands and feet tied to a mattress.
His name was often printed on signs held at demonstrations in June.
“There is still a very narrow understanding of racism in Germany,” Della said. ‘It is, so to speak, only racism as an intention can be proved. That does not work as institutional racism. ”
He wants future laws to be made with the understanding that racist action is possible even without intent.
About 33 percent of people surveyed in Germany as part of a “Being Black in the EU” study conducted by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency said they had experienced discrimination based on their ethnic background.
According to Rafael Behr, a professor at the Police Academy in Hamburg, the problem with law enforcement is that it is a dominant culture, as he calls it.
“The police assume that they define what is normal and what is not, who hears and who does not hear,” he said.
“If police officers rely on their empirical values or gut feelings at stops, it can be problematic, because of course they sometimes have a bad experience, which can then lead to bias” in future interactions, said Behr, a former police officer.
In addition to the changes to the law in Berlin and Bremen, there are other small signs that the protests this spring, and the subsequent renewed emphasis on anti-racism, will have an impact.
In Berlin, protesters recounted a 20-year controversy surrounding the name of the Mohrenstraße underground station in June. “Mohr”, as nut in English, is a dated and insulting term for a person of color. Protesters manipulated the subway sign, calling it “George Floyd Street.” Lies.
On July 3, the BVG transit authority of Berlin announced that it would rename the station.
“We wanted to get rid of the current name because it discriminates against all non-white people,” her spokeswoman told NBC News.
Politicians are now debating the name of the entire street in Berlin-Mitte, the city’s branch of the Senate for Environment, Transportation and Climate Protection told NBC News.
For Gohou, even these small changes give him a sense of hope.
“The protests are the first step and we have to start somewhere,” he said. “Many white people are now waking up to what went wrong. Before it was black people who advocated for black people and now you see white people everywhere protesting for civil rights. It does feel like our generation is changing something. ”
