Bavaria: Police relay antennas burned
translated from German to French from de.indymedia, 17 December 2021
During the night of 13.12. we set fire to two transmission antennas of the Bavarian Criminal Police Centre in Nuremberg.
There are countless reasons for hating and attacking the police.
The main mission of the police is to keep the existing social status quo in place. This means that police officers are paid to ensure the preservation of an exploitative, racist, sexist social and economic system based on the exclusion of minorities. It is their job to defend profit and the dominant position of the powerful in this system against any attempt to change in the direction of social justice, equality, redistribution or environmental sustainability. The police thus share the ideology of inequality in which LGBTQIA+, migrant, poor or disabled people are worth less than others, so are systematically denied access to basic and equal rights. By their very function, the police are necessarily conservative and politically right-wing.
In the media, political and legal spheres, the police are attributed inexistent neutrality and expertise, which is supposed to allow them to describe events or judge situations objectively. In fact, they are a political operator who openly acts against those they consider the embodiment of their enemies (people considered to be deviant, those who aspire to social change, or migrants), and are also given the sole right to interpret their attacks.
The police are of enormous importance for the profit-mongers of capitalism in order to preserve relations of domination, that’s why they are getting more and more powers and means to exercise their violence. They are given new weapons such as tasers (in North Rhine-Westphalia) or tanks and hand grenades (in Bavaria) to use against their demonised enemies. The police ban demonstrations or postpone events such as football matches, arbitrarily detain people or search and destroy homes at will.
The racism of this organisation is expressed daily in racial profiling and racist insults, as well as the more than 200 racially motivated murders by cops since 1990. The German police murder in prison cells (e.g. in Dessau), rape in homes (e.g. in Erfurt), give victims of gender violence additional sexual harassment (e.g. in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), enrich themselves with theft (e.g. in Leipzig) and inflict innumerable bodily injuries and deprivations of liberty in the streets, especially against migrants and leftists – safe in the knowledge of their complete impunity.
We are neither surprised nor outraged by far-right Chat groups, the participation of police officers in racist manhunts (e.g. in Freiburg) or by their involvement with the AfD in their free time. The police is a right-wing organisation, its members want to preserve the oppressive mechanisms of this society and fight everything that is “of the left”, “foreign” or “troublesome”. Of course, they participate in right-wing Chat groups and reinforce each other’s ideology.
Guaranteed impunity, unchallengeable media presence, plus an arsenal of weapons and endless surveillance powers make the police an extremely dangerous and effective right-wing organisation. The cops are a danger for LGBTQIA+, migrants and all those committed to social/ecological change in society.
That is why every attack on the organisation “Police” is to be welcomed. Every opposition, every disruption of the normal course of police work, everything that prevents it from committing its misdeeds, is important. Every attack on its infrastructure or on individual police officers is legitimate. These are people who joined the police out of ideological conviction. No one is obliged to become a cop!
That’s why, in the night of 13.12, we attacked the infrastructure of the police in Nuremberg by setting fire to their mobile radio masts in Marienbergpark park and at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). According to the PJ, the antennas are designed to provide radio links during their interventions throughout the city. For this reason, they had the antennas protected by guards, steel fences and barbed wire.
While awaiting the usual official statements (“violence takes on a new dimension / endangerment of innocent people”), a few more words about the targets: we have no interest in the police being able to coordinate and synchronise their activities throughout the city’s neighbourhoods. It is against them that our action is directed; the emergency services and fire brigade do not need a seamless connection in order to work. This is only necessary for dynamic and mobile interventions of the police (for example, chases or surveillance). We made sure that no one was endangered by the attack. At no time was there any risk to the campers in the Marienbergpark or to the workers in the vicinity of the tower of the Office for Migration and Refugees.
We see the activity of the police as a potential threat to anyone they deem ‘troublesome’ or ‘foreign’. Therefore, we hope that with these fires, future interventions in the city will no longer work as smoothly.
