Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by semi-extrinsic 2539 days ago
Hmm, searching around for the type of statistics you are talking about, I get articles to a couple of anecdotal stories that are frequently repeated on sites like Jihad Watch, Voice of Europe, RT, etc.

Unless you can provide some actual statistics, I would dismiss this as unfounded far-right propaganda.

2 comments

It's conflating a couple of recent examples (london bridge knife terror attack trial reports is one) where the police protect themselves and wait for backup but the public try to intervene against their orders and trying to imply there's an agenda by the police to let these things happen.
The attacks on firefighters and medics have been increasing at least in Germany, though finding reporting about it is a bit difficult since politicians used it a s a pretext to change the level of penalty for attacks on medics and firefighters and included cops in the category. Especially including the last group but not doctors and nurses in clinics makes it look more like another law and order push then anything else. As such statistics often tend to group together cops with first responders, which makes any comparison useless.

This is especially problematic since its a historical logical loop in Germany to charge people getting beaten up by cops for attacking a police officer. If they hadnt attacked a police officer it would have been illegal for the cop to beat them up and the prosecutor would be forced to charge the officer for assault. If there is however a open case against the victim, the charges will get dropped most of the time or at least paused in especially controversial cases till after the trial is over. As such you are highly incentivized to never report a cop for assault, especially as even statements of singular police officers get routinely valued higher then reports from multiple bystanders who dont know the victim. If you dont have a tape of what happened your chances of going to jail are high. This isnt something limited to protests and other large public events, there is an infamous case where police officers mixed up a 60yo translator assigned to a suspect with being connected to the accused and she ended beaten up in a police station and charged with attacking police officers. She was lucky that the judge believed her medical examiner that the reports of the cops at the station couldnt be true given the evidence. The other witnesses disagreeing with that story would have likely not been enough. The charges for assault against the cops were however dropped as usual.

German source: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/prozess-um-gewalt-auf-d...

You can find statistics about attacks on firefighters and medics (and not police officers) here for Bavaria (in German though but just scroll to the first graph)

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/gewalt-gegen-rettungskr...

It is more problematic then the shown increase from 250/265 to 327 since medics and firefighter representatives mention a high number of unreported cases. The article mentions a survey among 800 of them had 92% reporting getting insulted or threatened and 1/4 getting physically attacked during the last 12 month. Link to the study in the article is unfortunately down.