Really terrible to say: But to be honest, it is hardly surprising what dimensions of baseness come to light when you look back in the days after a murder like that of the 24-year-old police officer and the 29-year-old chief inspector in Kusel, Rhineland-Palatinate internet. The mass is frightening, a new investigation group “Hate Speech” has counted a total of 102 cases of criminal hate speech in connection with this attack on police officers. And the fantasies of violence against officials that are expressed there also take your breath away. But those who have to deal with the badness of the world more often – as police officers in particular do – should probably no longer be amazed by it in 2022.
What surprises, still and even more so, is something else: how little is politically active. Sure, nice new paragraphs have been written in the three years since the murder of the CDU politician Walter Lübcke; tightened penalties for speech offenses in particular. But these new paragraphs have not been used much more often than the old ones since then. It’s going very, very slowly building up new units of investigators and prosecutors. The system is sluggish and the judiciary is already heavily overburdened. Where is a federal state that is now freeing up capacities to a large extent in order to even begin to keep up with the completely escalating verbal violence on the Internet?
A higher probability that the perpetrators will actually be identified would be much more effective than a high threat of punishment, which is only on paper. That’s what’s missing. In Rhineland-Palatinate there is now the aforementioned “Hate Speech” investigation group with 14 people at the Koblenz public prosecutor’s office. If it were ten times its size, it might be able to set things in motion permanently.