Following an anonymous threatening letter, Berlin Chief Inspector Oliver von Dobrowolski has seen an increase in intimidation. He was insulted in as a ‘colleague pig’.
At the beginning of April, Berlin police chief inspector Oliver von Dobrowolski received an anonymous threatening letter with a live 9-millimetre ammunition. He has now publicised the incident on his blog. The letter was sent to a protected private address where he lives with his family. In it, he was labelled a ‘colleague pig’ and asked to stop publicly criticising the police.
This may refer to the fight against a German police force that von Dobrowolski – most recently in an interview with ‘nd’ – calls racist. The civil servant, who has been in the service since 1998, co-founded the BetterPolice association in 2021 to call for reform. He was previously active on the board of the PolizeiGrün network, which is close to the party of the same name.
Von Dobrowolski sees the current threat in the context of a years-long campaign against him. The attached ammunition represents a “strong qualitative increase” in the intimidation attempts, he says. These were also directed against other ‘police employees who are read as left-wing’.
In addition to this latest threat, the police officer reports further professional disadvantages due to his critical stance: he had not been transferred away from an abusive superior for 13 months, had experienced harassment from a ‘permanent complainant’ from police circles and perceived unequal treatment in investigation proceedings. While he himself was once investigated with great intensity by the state security services, offences reported by him had remained unsuccessful.
Von Dobrowolski, who published the book “’I’m fighting for a better police force”’ in 2022, reported the incident to the authorities. He decided to publish it after similar threats against a journalist and a politician in Berlin became known.
The police chief inspector is particularly disappointed with his department, which ‘trivialised attacks against me and/or those around me,’ he explains. There was never any protection or solidarity from the police leadership or the politicians responsible after such ‘attacks on us progressives’. ‘In my eyes, this encourages the perpetrators to continue with bullying and terror with impunity,’ says von Dobrowolski to ‘nd’.
He suspects that the threat came from a right-wing scene. Four years ago, the member newspaper of the German National Democratic Party (NPD) reported on the critical police officer under the heading ‘In the pillory’ and labelled him a ‘genuine far-left agitator’. Reactions to last week’s nd interview also give an indication of this milieu. Among others, a section of the DPolG police union commented maliciously. Von Dobrowolski explains that the DPolG is considered a ‘front organisation’ of the right-wing extremist party AfD.
Published in German in „nd“.
Image: In the anonymous letter, the Berlin police officer was asked to stop publicly criticising the police (Oliver von Dobrowolski).
