The Hamburg police scandal
In 1994, Hamburg's Minister of Interior Affairs Werner Hackmann stepped down in the wake of numerous reports of racially motivated police violence. The Hamburg Parliament subsequently set up a committee of inquiry to investigate the Hamburg police. At the hearings, more than 100 witnesses testified to abuses by police officers, xenophobia, and radical right-wing attitudes within the Hamburg police. For instance, Africans suspected of being drug dealers were led off to the police station tied together in groups, and this practice was unofficially referred to withthe derogatory expression Bimbos einsammeln, i.e. ‘rounding up the sambos’. Time and again, police officers would release arrested suspects on the outskirts of Hamburg, penniless, in the middle of the night. Witnesses also spoke of mock executions. Some 130 investigations into Hamburg police officers that had previously been filed away as closed were re-opened.
On the night of 15 January 1994, Dialle D. was beaten up by two drunk men; he had been wearing a cap with the words ‘Don’t give Nazis a chance’. When he went to file a complaint the following day, he found out that the assailants were in fact police officers. His passport was withheld at the police station. 12 weeks later he received an order to leave the country.
In his resignation statement, the social democrat Hackmann said that abuses against foreigners had taken on a dimension he had never thought possible, and that he hoped his resignation would lead to changes within the Hamburg police department.