She “looked into abysses that I would not have thought possible,” says judge Cornelia Amtage after she announced her verdict. The chats between the accused and other police colleagues were “inhuman and disgusting”.
The district court in Munich sentenced two suspended police officers to suspended sentences on Tuesday. The two men were sentenced to one year and eight months in prison for, among other things, the persecution of innocent people. The younger man was also convicted of providing and possessing narcotics – cocaine – and of coercion because he is said to have threatened a man taken into custody in 2019: “I’ll knock your teeth out in a moment, you weird person.”
The investigations against the ex-policemen born in 1984 and 1993 were carried out by the so-called “Soko Nightlife” as part of the drug scandal that became known at the beginning of 2020 at the Munich police headquarters. The investigators became aware of chat messages that suggested that the two officers did not tell the truth about an operation in Munich’s nightlife and invented a man’s attack on them.
The man had to pay
“For the fact that the push against me was fictitious, 300 euros is a lot. Actually really bad,” it said. “We stop.” The man whom the two police officers wrongly accused, according to the district court, had to pay a fine of these 300 euros after a court case in which the police officers testified against him.
Previously, a police check in Munich’s nightlife in November 2016 had escalated so much that the older of the two accused broke a man’s nose. “The mission got a little out of hand, at the end there was a broken nose, there was a lot of blood,” Judge Amtage summarized that night. The court found it proven that after this operation the two police officers agreed to claim that the man’s friend with the broken nose had been aggressive and pushed one of the police officers.
A “typical case of the persecution of innocent people,” says the judge. The two had “exploited and abused” the “leap of trust” that they enjoy as police officers when giving testimony. In the chat messages from the officials, who fill a folder, she discovered “excessive use of police force”, “joy, fun in exercising violence”. “It’s awesome how you escalated,” she quotes from it and: “I really needed it again, such an escalation” – like a “shepherd dog” who was kept on a leash for months and then finally let go.
A drug dealer started the investigation
The drug scandal became public in 2020 after a major raid. At the center of the story about coke-taking police officers is a drug dealer who got the investigation rolling after he unpacked his uniformed customers as a key witness and reported on cop discounts on cocaine – as well as on absurd situations such as coke coke with cops in the underground car park after they had helped him jump-start his car. For years, the so-called “Soko Nightlife” had investigated the matter.
Prosecutors conducted investigations against 37 police officers and filed eight charges. 15 preliminary investigations were stopped, three more against a payment of money. A penal order was requested in twelve cases, and charges were brought in eight cases.
Has the last word not been spoken yet?
Including Tuesday’s verdict, verdicts have now been issued in four cases in which indictments have been filed. One of the police officers was sentenced to a fine of 240 daily rates, two others to prison terms of two and a half and three years respectively. In addition, in two cases police officers were acquitted after an appeal against the respective penal order.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, the charges against three other police officers have been raised by the district court, two of them are being heard before the lay judge.
And even in the case judged in the first instance on Tuesday, the last word has probably not yet been spoken. The lawyer for the older defendant has already announced that he wants to challenge and appeal the verdict, which also includes payments to a homeless organization and the unjustly accused person as a monetary condition. The younger man’s defense attorney wanted to think it over.
However, there will probably not be a way back into the police service for the suspended officers, even if the verdict against them is not yet final. The younger one has since become self-employed as a site manager, and the older one has started studying. He is now studying law.
