At the beginning of the Bundesliga season there were several incidents between fans and police. This has fueled the discussions about police measures around Bundesliga games. The announced reform of the file “violent offenders sport” has also come to a standstill according to sports show research.
There was great outrage when the Werder Bremen fans were only let through from the main station in the direction of the stadium at the away game in Wolfsburg on the 1st Bundesliga matchday by the police after their personal details had been determined and pyrotechnics had been scanned. For no apparent reason. Lower Saxony’s Interior Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) has since apologized: “The culture of mistakes in a modern police force also means that corresponding mistakes are recognized and named. This is the only way to do things better in the future.”he explained.
The anger about this police operation – in an encounter between non-enemy fan camps – will still have an aftermath. The Bremen fanhilfe has announced that it will have the operation legally reviewed. This is intended to establish the illegality of the measures, which the police continue to defend.
fans against police action
fanAids support supporters in legal conflicts and criticize what they see as the often disproportionate actions of the police. Meanwhile, football fight backfans more and more often against such police measures in the context of Bundesliga games. In Bavaria, for example, more than 1,600 trailers were saved in a state-owned police file last year. Without informing those affected.
These so-called SKB files are maintained in nine other federal states and have only come to light in recent years. SKB stands for officials who are familiar with the scene. In the meantime, however, due to numerous requests for information from footballfans the number of people stored there almost halved. At the beginning of July 2022, according to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, only just under 850 people were listed.
Above all, the very low-threshold storage practice had caused massive criticism, because an initial suspicion is enough to be recorded. This is one of the reasons why the umbrella organization calls for the fanHelp “a total abolition of all unlawful data collection on football fans”.
Further discussions about the “Violent Sport” file.
This also applies to the controversial data collection “Violent Sport” (DGS). Before the start of the new Bundesliga season, fans were hoping for a reform of the file. Because the government parties had announced such a reform in their coalition paper because of the numerous criticisms of the storage practice.
Even during the time of the ghost games, over 1,000 people had been entered into it by the police, like one Small request from the Greens to the then federal government. This was also due to the low-threshold storage practice, similar to the SKB files. So became fans also ever registered there because of a simple determination of personal data.
research of sports inside show, for example, that more than a quarter of the people recorded in the “Violent Sport Offenders” (DGS) file (a total of 7,841 people at the beginning of 2021) are not violent offenders. Therefore, the DGS has come under public pressure and is currently being subjected to a critical review. Subsequently, where necessary, the regulations should be adjusted – according to the federal government.
File reform shelved?
According to sportschau.de research, the first steps are already being planned. Above all, it should be prevented that previously unsuspecting fans are included directly in the “violent sport offenders” file. The police authority responsible for a new entry should consult with the scene officers (SKBs) of the respective fanscene bindingly agree whether such an entry makes sense.
Or not, like Matthias Mendel from the state police headquarters in Lower Saxony interview with sportschau.de explained: “It’s about the exchange of existing information on occasions that might be worth storing. We would include this person in the DGS for one reason or another, how do you see that?”
The scene-savvy officials would their respective fankeep an eye on the scene so that the followers can assess it better than police officers who work elsewhere. This should also help to prevent unnecessary storage, explains Mendel: “In this way, we can also avoid that previously unsuspecting and, above all, uninvolved persons are included in the file because of a simple identity check.” In addition, it should be checked at least once a year whether an entry is still justified, adds the first chief inspector. This too has not yet been firmly established everywhere.
The umbrella organization of fanhilfe, the planned review of the “Gewalttäter Sport” file still doesn’t go far enough. “We therefore hope that the current review will also be followed by far-reaching reforms or that the file will even be abolished in the end.”the umbrella organization explains to sportschau.de.
The final report of the review should be available by the end of the year. The responsible police authority is currently assuming that this will also be published. The current debate about the proportionality of police measures against footballfans will then revive at the latest.