Police incident with homeless man prompts probe
June 12, 2020
Two police officers from Germany's eastern state of Brandenburg have been suspended after a video emerged of them harassing a 70-year-old homeless man.
The footage purportedly shows one officer shoving the inebriated man last Sunday night before trying to kick him.
However, it was difficult to determine whether or not the victim received a kick because the video quality was poor due to the dark, investigators said.
Tagesspiegel reported that the officers had been called to attend to an apparently drunk man — who was well known to police — after he allegedly threw a bottle at another man, but missed him.
The incident was filmed by the second officer from a patrol car on the roadside. The 90-second sequence was then shared on social media and courted public criticism.
"Both officers were apparently amused and laughed," police said in a statement on Thursday.
Criminal proceedings launched
Officials said the pair would face disciplinary and criminal proceedings for possible slander and disparagement.
The alleged harassment took at Bad Belzig, roughly between Berlin and Leipzig, and coincided with global scrutiny of police conduct amid outrage over the videoed death of George Floyd, a black man who died on May 25 in police custody.
Read more: Neo-Nazi murder of Alberto Adriano remembered, 20 years on
Anti-racism advocates in Germany list various fatalities, including the neo-Nazi NSU murder series between 2000 and 2007, and the 2005 death in police custody of Oury Jalloh, an asylum seeker from Sierra Leone.
His charred body found tied to a mattress in a police cell that had been engulfed in flames at a police station in Dessau in Saxony-Anhalt state.
German WDR public radio last month published a five-part podcast series examining the police and investigators' handling of the 15-year-old case.
ipj/msh (AP, AFP)