Since "Israel’s" German-backed genocidal war on Gaza began over two years ago, the excessive and violent police actions against members of the Palestine solidarity movement in Germany, particularly in the capital Berlin, have done irreparable damage to the country’s global reputation.

Multiple human rights watchdogs have denounced the pattern of violence committed by the platoons of police officers routinely deployed at peaceful, anti-genocide rallies.

But the Berliner Polizei, drunk on power and a lack of accountability, seems to wear these repeated condemnations as badges of honour, rather than treat them as clarion calls for desperately needed self-examination and self-improvement.

Legalising breaking and entering

Under controversial mayor Kai Wegner and his Christian Democratic-led coalition government, the city-state of Berlin is expanding police powers in an unprecedented manner.

On December 4, Berlin’s state parliament passed a new police law which is truly the stuff of Orwellian nightmares and is bound to exacerbate post-October 7 Germany’s glaring democratic deficit.

Among other things, this reform of the existing “General Security and Public Order Act” (ASOG) allows the police to secretly break into and enter the residences of persons of interest and install spyware on their laptops and phones.

It also legalises shoot-to-kill, meaning that officers can now make lethal use of their firearms without fear of prosecution.

In a statement following the successful passage of the law, Wegner framed it as a necessity to fight terrorism, protect women from domestic violence and as a load off the shoulders of police officers who “work hard every day” and now have “clearer powers, better tools and more backing.”

At a time when the Zionist German state treats the liberation slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as support for terrorism, it is not hard to see who the primary targets of this audaciously authoritarian law will be.

Also, Wegner fails to mention the numerous instances of gender-based violence against female protesters that his uniformed officers have been implicated in, including sexual assault.

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And does racially profiling black and brown people, loitering in marked police vans all day on the taxpayers’ dime and beating up peaceful men, women and children at protests really qualify as “hard work?”

Overfunding the police

Wegner, whose transparent copaganda routinely frames violent police officers at pro-Palestine protests as victims, is not solely to blame for police in the city going rogue; successive administrations have enabled police misconduct and overreach by overfunding a gluttonous institution that lacks even a semblance of oversight.

A December study by the Berlin-based Justice Collective, a project that seeks to “end societies’ reliance on policing, punishment, and prisons,” according to its website, found that Berlin’s police budget saw a 65% increase within 14 years, growing from under €1.2 billion in 2010 to over €2 billion in 2024.

To put these numbers in perspective, the police budget is larger than the entire budget for the Department of Labor, Social Affairs, Equality, Integration, Diversity and Anti-Discrimination and more than twice the size of the budget for the Department of Culture and Social Cohesion, say the authors.

Especially under the left-wing coalition government consisting of the Social Democrats, DIE LINKE and the Greens, which ran the city from 2016 to 2021, the police budget increased by a whopping 34%.

According to the 57-page report, this disproportional and “outsized spending” is “fuelled and legitimised by ever-new waves of moral panics, in which racist narratives linking migration to crime and disorder drive demands for more and more policing, specifically against migrantized groups.”

The authors also say that “Berlin has expended considerable resources to police demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine” and that “this policing has been marked by widespread violence.”

Violating the principle of neutrality

When it comes to prohibiting uniformed Muslim or Sikh officers from wearing religious head coverings, German police officials are always quick to point to the principle of neutrality that government employees, including law enforcement, are bound to.

But when Germany’s geopolitical interests are at stake, especially when these are tied to the country’s pro-Israel Staatsräson, the police’s allegedly holy Neutralitätsgebot is instantaneously tossed overboard.

A recent investigation by independent German news outlet Itidal revealed how Berlin’s police president, Barbara Slowik Meisel, blatantly violated that principle of neutrality when she participated in an Israeli-sponsored trip to Tel Aviv in order to “learn from Israel’s police.”

What was marketed as a security conference was in fact a propaganda event where Israeli arms manufacturers, many of which have supplied the IOF with products used in its genocide in Gaza, showcased weaponry and where agenda items had titles such as “Recognising threats” and “Hamas threat in Germany”, reports Itidal.

Slowik Meisel and police presidents from other German states were also asked to clamp down harder on anti-"Israel" content on social media in speeches delivered to the guests from Germany, according to the investigation.

If there were any residual doubts about the entrenched anti-Palestinian racism of the Berlin police, this immoral lobby trip to the Zionist entity by the agency’s highest-ranking official has dispelled them all.

As 2025 ends, it remains clear that the Berliner Polizei does not primarily serve the people of the city, but rather the interests of a foreign, settler colonial regime 3,000 kilometres away which continues to annihilate, ethnically cleanse and oppress the original inhabitants of the lands it occupies.