The announcement by the Left Party in the Berlin district of Neukölln to stop clan raids in shisha bars has been met with criticism. “This is exactly the wrong signal to the population. It doesn’t work at all. It’s a setback in the fight against criminal structures,” Neukölln Christian Democratic Union (CDU) district leader Falko Liecke told the newspaper Welt. “Now we have an administration dominated by ideology.”
The background is the reallocation of the Neukölln city council. While the departments of health and social affairs are to be run by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Left Party will in future take over the public order department.” … We were surprised: the Office of Public Order is not so obvious at first. But we will deal with the tasks now. We have long been calling for an end to the stigmatising raids on shisha bars and late-night bars. A reappraisal is necessary here,” Nagel said a few days ago.
The announcement also caused surprise in the Senate Department of the Interior. “Police measures are always directed against individual offenders or groups, regardless of ethnic, cultural or family affiliation,” the newspaper Die Welt quoted a spokesperson as saying. The large number of violations of the law detected in the process shows that only by maintaining the pressure of control and punishing corresponding violations can organised crime be fought.
According to the paper, the SPD and the Greens are also upset. According to a joint draft programme, the district should continue to cooperate with the police and the public prosecutor’s office “in order to support the fight against organised crime, among other things in the form of so-called criminal clan-based groups and their dominant presence in public space”.
Neukölln is considered a stronghold of organised crime in Germany. In the past, district mayor Martin Hikel (SPD) took action against this with so-called joint operations. Last year he defended this strategy: “It is not racist to fight crime,” he told the newspaper Tagesspiegel.
But even in his party, there was not unqualified support for the consistent action against clans. In 2020, the working group Migration and Diversity had tried to abolish the term “clan crime”. “Protection of Berlin’s trade and industry of migrants. Against the use of the term clan crime”, was the title of a motion, but it was not adopted.
Previously, the Left Party politician Niklas Schrader had already criticised: “Criminal are deeds, not families. Crimes are committed by individuals or groups.” The term clan crime is directed against certain families, although there are numerous members who are completely innocent. This leads to the fact that people with corresponding surnames, for example, can no longer find flats.