With a wave of protests shaking the US in response to racism and police violence, Germany's Justice and Interior Ministries have started work on a study that would probe the so-called "racial profiling" in the German police. The term indicates increased targeting of ethnic minorities, most commonly by law enforcement agencies.

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The study is currently in the "conceptual development" stage, a spokesman said on Thursday.

"From the perspective of Germany's Justice Ministry, a study on racial profiling... is an important step to obtain well-founded information on the phenomenon and... discuss possible counter-measures," he added.

Germany's doorstep

The move comes just days after Saskia Esken, one of the co-leaders of the left-leaning SPD party, claimed there was "latent racism in the ranks of security forces."

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"Tens of thousands of protesters are rallying all over the world, because the violent death of George Floyd during a police deployment is no exception," she told the  Funke Mediengruppe. "However, German protesters are also looking at the situation on their own doorstep."

While pointing to the alleged racist bias against minority groups, Esken also noted that the majority of police officers were very critical of such tendencies. She advocated setting up an independent office that would look into into complaints against police behavior.

Merz disputes 'latent racism'

Other senior officials, including German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, disputed Esken's comments. Notably, Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht said that a new office to process complaints would be superfluous next to police departments already dealing with the issue. Lambrecht, who is part of Esken's SPD party, also said she did not see "a particular, structural racism problem" in the police force.

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Conservative Friedrich Merz, who hopes to take the reins of Angela Merkel's CDU party, said that there was no "latent racism" in the German police and said it was "unreliable, to transpose images from America one-on-one to Germany." The US had a history of slavery and had failed to solve "the problem of racial discrimination," but it was different in Germany, Merz claimed.

Germany's Basic Law expressly forbids discrimination due to "gender, origin, race, language, homeland and heritage, beliefs, religious or political views."

In 2018, however, a German judge ruled that authorities could use skin color as a criteria for its work "when the police have concrete indications that persons with darker skin incur criminal penalties over-proportionally more often" in a certain area.

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dj/msh (AFP, dpa, epd)

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