Linke on public safety

The Left wants to abolish the domestic intelligence service (Verfassungsschutz) and replace it with an independent monitoring office. As a first step, the system of paid informants would be exposed and ended.

The Verfassungsschutz is a secret service inside Germany. The Left wants to abolish it. An independent office should replace it. First, the secret informants should go.

The new office would monitor authoritarianism and group-focused hostility. Informants are recruited from within the scenes being watched; the platform sees entanglements with the far right among them. Their use would be investigated and stopped as a first step.

The Left rejects data retention, state spyware and blanket video surveillance and wants to ban biometric surveillance and chat scanning. In its view, more surveillance and tougher criminal laws do not bring more security.

The Left wants less surveillance. The state should not store data just in case. Cameras should not be allowed to recognize faces. The state should not check private chats.

The party also rejects subscriber data requests, dragnet searches, non-individualized cell tower queries and eavesdropping operations. The anti-terror laws of the past 30 years would be reviewed from a civil rights perspective. It opposes checks based on skin color, religion, language or origin, as well as occupational bans, preventive detention and loyalty clauses for public grants. Instead, criminal police and prosecutors would be better equipped for economic and cyber crime; large events would need plans against sexualized violence.

The Left demands that police officers be individually identifiable and rejects equipping police with military weapons, tasers and rubber bullets. At the same time, police training and working conditions are to improve.

Every police officer should wear an ID mark. Then people can identify the officer. Police should not use tasers or rubber bullets. Pepper spray should be banned at demonstrations.

Operation logs and police videos would be stored with trustee offices to help investigate misconduct. The party rejects machine guns, armored vehicles and explosives for police; special tactical units should not be deployed at demonstrations. Pepper spray would be sharply restricted and banned at assemblies and events. Berlin's participation law would be adopted federally to bring more people with a migration background into the federal police. Psychological support for officers would improve, and disadvantages for eastern German officers would be removed.