A police officer from Heilbronn, a city in southern Germany, has been officially reprimanded for putting a sticker on his private mobile phone.
As German news outlet Junge Frieheit reported yesterday, the man had attached a sticker reading “FCK GRN” on the personal device – a presumable shorthand for “Fuck Green”, expressing discontent with the policies of the Greens party.
Representatives of Die Partei, a small left-wing party, had spotted the unnamed police officer taking a picture with the phone while in uniform in April and uploaded a photo of him to their Instagram account where it caused a stir among Die Partei supporters.
Alexander Wezel, the party’s only councillor on Heilbronn’s 40-seat municipal council, subsequently sued the officer for infringing on the requirement for State neutrality, which also covers police officers.
Wezel said: “The fact that a police officer on duty openly displays such a politically charged and aggressive statement is incompatible with the state’s requirement for neutrality,” Junge Frieheit reported.
“I don’t care which party such a sticker is directed against – expressions of political opinion have no place on duty. This applies equally to all political persuasions.”
Wezel also complained that the sticker made him feel insecure as a queer person because it showed that the policeman would “openly show that [the officer] rejects certain political convictions”, which would lead him to doubt whether he was being fairly treated by the police.
The Heilbronn police consequently started disciplinary proceedings against the officer and found that he had infringed the State neutrality requirement, even though the sticker had been on his personal phone and not his service device.
The policeman received an official reprimand. He reportedly showed understanding and vowed to remove the sticker from his phone.
The prosecutor’s office had previously thrown out Wezel’s suit against the officer, saying that the sticker was covered by freedom of expression.
Local newspaper Heilbronner Stimme accused Wezel of “double standards” as the city councillor himself had put a sticker reading “FCK AFD” on his laptop, expressing his disdain for the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD).
