Punk card index
The punk-index was in 1982 by the police department Hanover led index , the punks and skinheads in order to "gain an overview of the punk scene in Hannover" were listed and to counter a feared threat to public safety and order. As a reaction to the card index, the Chaostage, which later regularly took place in various cities, was proclaimed for the first time .
history
The card index was set up at the end of August 1982 under the then Police President Gottfried Walzer and kept secret by the criminal investigation department 7 responsible for state security. All departments of the protection and criminal police in Hanover were instructed "to inform the central news and evaluation office of the KFI 7 informally in writing of all findings about so-called punks".
The file was uncovered after a police officer anonymously sent a copy of the order to Die Tageszeitung (taz) in early November 1982 and this was published by the journalist Jürgen Voges. During the chaos in 1983, the press spokesman for the police headquarters stated that the file was still in existence. A retention should be reviewed and decided by the end of the year. However, it remained unknown whether it was continued during the ongoing chaos.
Legal evaluation
It was criticized that the card index had been set up without the necessary establishment order . This was only subsequently obtained and submitted five days after the taz publication. Furthermore, it was considered unlawful, since, according to Lower Saxony law, such files may only be kept to investigate criminal offenses or to ward off specific dangers. Since in addition to "people from the punk scene who have committed criminal acts or administrative offenses", those should also be included "from whom it is to be expected that they will violate regulations on the maintenance of public safety and order", it was also criticized as a preventive state measure , among others by the lawyer and SPD member of the state parliament Werner Holtfort .
Reactions
Political argument
Due to the Punker card index and other criticized surveillance actions by the Lower Saxony police , the opposition parties in the Lower Saxony state parliament, the SPD , FDP and the Greens , demanded a control of police files by parliament.
A council debate on the card index on January 13, 1983 provisionally led to the exclusion of the GABL and DKP parliamentary groups from further meetings. In April 1983, the majority of the council voted with the votes of the SPD, GABL and DKP in favor of rejecting such police data collections. The CDU , ruling with an absolute majority , continued to support the police.
Opinions
In a statement, police chief Gottfried Walzer announced that he had "not given much thought to deleting punk names from the card index [...]". His deputy Thomas Sporn announced: "With the evaluation we wanted to try to draw conclusions from the criminal sociology about the punks".
The Interior Minister of Lower Saxony at the time, Egbert Möcklinghoff, criticized Walzer for having acted prematurely, to which he replied: “Experience has shown that it can take a long time for the establishment order to be given a statement by the State Criminal Police Office and finally to reach the Minister of the Interior. It is quite common for us to collect data in parallel. "
Review by the data protection officer
At the same time as the establishment order subsequently issued, the then Lower Saxony data protection officer and previous head of the police department in the Ministry of the Interior, Klaus Tebarth, announced a review of the card index and legal basis. This revealed that 62 people were listed in the card index, of which 57 investigations into criminal offenses and administrative offenses had been initiated or concluded. This also included the names of four underage youths who had become “lost” at home and who appeared to the police as “endangered”. What remained unresolved was the fact that the police had initially spoken of a hundred people in the file, but only 62 names were listed when presented to the data protection officer.
Tebarth considered the card index to be basically justified, since the punks pose a specific danger to public safety and order, but demanded that the conditions for inclusion in the file and deletion should be more specific.
Protests
In protest against the card index, the scene activist Karl Nagel and with the support of the punk band Dead Kennedys, who were then on a European tour, proclaimed the Chaostage , which took place in Hanover for the first time on December 18, 1982 . The aim of the event was to make the file with excessive and incorrect information unusable and to hinder the work of the investigators. For this purpose, people from other subcultures showing solidarity were also called upon to mingle with the demonstrators as punks. In the following year there were further demonstrations against the card index.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Peter Seewald: Unbridled Passion . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1983, pp. 51-53 ( online ).
- ↑ The Chaostage are history In: goettinger-tageblatt.de. 2nd August 2015
- ↑ Kira Schamania: We'll be back, no question! next year is chaos days! Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2008, ISBN 978-3-8370-4467-6 , p. 7.
- ↑ a b days of chaos Order is bad. In: Zeitgeschichten. on: Spiegel-online.
- ↑ a b 235 criminal charges / new discussion about punk card index. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Hannoversche Allgemeine. 5th July 1983 in the archive of chaostage.de
- ↑ Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein: Hanover Chronicle: From the beginnings to the present: Numbers, dates, facts. Schlütersche, 1991, p. 286.
- ↑ Oliver Herbertz: The organization of chaos days . In: Gregor Betz, Ronald Hitzler , Michaela Pfadenhauer: Urban Events. 2011, p. 247.
- ↑ My rat is huge . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1983, pp. 65-71 ( online ).
