Police operation on the “Kotti”: Is a real danger met here – or does police control only create the dangers?
Photo: Imago. Friedrichs
»On Thursday between 5:30 p.m. and 6 p.m., the Berlin police at the Kottbusser Tor suspected a bicycle theft. Suddenly at least 50 people are said to have merged into a group and have started to the officials, «writes the tabloid” BZ “in September 2018. Shortly afterwards, a 45 second video is viral. It shows how a police officer kneels on one person, another strikes her fist on her. After 25 seconds, another policeman is added and begins to stand up on the ground lying on the ground. Change calls, the video ends with civil servants that approach them with pepper spray. The next day the tone of the »BZ« changes. Now there is talk of a “brutal police operation at the Kottbusser Tor”.
Abolitionist case study
During the same period, Nora Keller researched the Kottbusser Tor, the “Kotti” in Berlin-Kreuzberg, to danger, violence and police. She is shocked by the occurrence and is all the more surprising when her interview partners – 22 people living there – do not mention it in their conversations. “At the Kottbusser Tor itself, the incident soon didn’t seem worth mentioning,” writes Keller. In other words, police violence seems normalized there.
A year later, another recording causes excitement: the video for the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis with his repeated reputation – “I can’t break” (I can’t breathe). It forms the starting signal of the anti-racist Black-Lives-Matter movement and strengthens abolitionist police criticism. Abolitionism is in the tradition of abolishing slavery. Representatives demand the end of repressive structures such as the police and prisons as well as the ideologies underlying and the creation of solidarity structures.
When Keller begins her research on the Kotti, she has never heard of George Floyd. Nevertheless, her work reads like a abolitionist case study that has so far been rare in Germany. The Kotti as a place where migrants and poor people are criminalized – and where residents, the Kottians, develop approaches. The latter positive orientation promises the title of the book by Keller: “stronger than what separates us”.
A “dangerous place”?
The Kottbusser Tor, a centrally located traffic junction in Berlin with Spätis, play casinos, vegetable stands and cafés, was to be converted into a sought -after residential area in the 1960s. According to hundreds of reductions and gentrification projects, the proportion of children living in poverty is twice as high today as in the rest of Berlin. 70 percent of the residents have a migration background, also a maximum rate.
The police call the place a “dangerous” or “crime -stressed” place. There is no clear legal definition for this, but it enables suspicion -independent personal checks that can decide on the beats in “specific circumstances of the individual case”. Similar attempts to create a threat situation are currently undertaking in order to be able to identify asylum seekers more or less EU law.
For several years now there has been a security trend to describe and approach dangers as local phenomena, writes Keller. At the same time, this approach is created in the history of the police. In the early 18th century, their task was the elimination of “disorder”, synonymous with the criminalization of the habitats of poor people. The limited at the end of the 19th century the “Kreuzberg judgment”. After that, the police should prevent illegal conditions. According to the critical criminology, definitions of security and danger are socially produced. Critical criminology interprets crime in demarcation to traditional criminology as an expression of social inequality and balance of power.
For the Kottians themselves, the space is not as dangerous as shown in Keller’s interviews. Reports therefore founded provoked acts of violence and were politically motivated; The occurrences are not Kotti-specific but general social problems; Or existing phenomena are presented one -sided and exaggerated. Keller quotes “Benja” – all names are changed in work. »Looked at a RTL documentary about the dangerous place Kottbusser Tor and then you see a crazy one who jumps around. (…) And if you know Kemal (…), he’s crazy (…), but it is also creative, I find it funny. “
“Prison solution”
According to the basement, the Kotti serves as a social space of reproduction and reinforcement of unequal subjectivations: “In this sense, the Kottbusser goal constitutes criminal subjects or, according to the analytical approaches of this work, subjects that are criminalized.” The respective subject positions are socially constructed, and so Keller follows Daniel Loick and Vanessa E. Thompson. distinguished subjects worth protecting. According to the interviewees, people on the Kotti are checked, especially suspicion-independent and experience police violence if they are mainly non-white, male, young and poor. In Great Britain, the only European country that regularly evaluates the characteristics of people who are checked regardless of suspicion, the risk of black people was 40 times as high in 2019 as for white.
Problematic conditions of capitalism are eliminated by the criminalization of the residents.
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In general, suspicion -independent personal checks that happen due to racist attributions violate the Basic Law. In Berlin there has even been the State Antid Icrimination Act in Berlin, which reverses the burden of proof – police officers have to prove that they have not traded racist and proportionate. Personal controls, however, are a low intervention in freedom rights in court, which is why the proportionality is quickly given. The high number of procedural settings also shows how difficult it is to proceed against such controls. Keller writes, often only video material – as in the cases of »BZ« and George Floyd.
It is a state from which there is a hard time – like a prison, as the Kottians describe – difficult to escape. The geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore provides a reason for this with an approach to the term “prison solution”. In marginalized neighbors, problematic conditions of capitalism, such as poverty, are eliminated by the criminalization of the residents. Controls of the Kottis would therefore be a modern attempt to lock marginalized groups away.
Center of the residential struggle
However, policating the Kottis has another effect than that of discrimination: the Kottians avoid, shaped by their experiences, the general understanding of security and build their own concepts of responsibility. It is not for nothing that the Kotti is known as a center of the residential struggle. The residents organize telephone chains, meet for meetings in so -called Friday rounds, observe police behavior, strive to communicate with each other instead of escalating conflicts and building neighborly supply structures for old or sick relatives. However, the descriptions of the alternatives remain marginal phenomena in Keller’s book.
Today, according to Keller’s publication, the policies of the Kottis have continued to worry. In 2023, a new police station opened directly at the square, since the beginning of 2025 one of Berlin’s new “knife ban zones” has been there, and the intersection has now been monitored by video. According to the Berlin data protection officer Maike Kamp, this violates data protection rights. The criminalization spiral on the Kotti continues. At the same time, he remains, if you believe Keller’s optimism, a place where power relationships are contested.
Nora Keller: “stronger than what separates us”. Criminalizations and solidarity at the “dangerous place” Kottbusser Tor in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Westphalian steamboat 2024, 240 p., Br., 28 €.