Test field football: criticism of Bavaria’s secret fan monitoring


Test field soccer
Criticism of Bavaria’s secret fan surveillance

Football is often seen as a testing ground for new monitoring methods. Organized fans are particularly in focus. Law enforcement officers attribute great potential for violence to them. A media report now reveals a previously unknown fan surveillance. There is a lot of criticism about that.

The police in Bavaria maintains a previously little-known database with the personal details of football fans and is therefore criticized by data protectionists and fan representatives. The “kicker” reports about it. In response to a written request from the Green Parliamentarians Katharina Schulze and Max Deisenhofer, the magazine reports 1644 people in the database with the name “EASy Violence and Sport”. That is significantly more than in the nationwide “file for violent offenders sport”, in which around 500 people resident in the Free State are listed.

The “kicker” continues to report some cases of complete surveillance in the context of soccer games. In addition to personal information, the stadium visits and the exact location within the stadium are stored in the database. Deisenhofer criticized the establishment of the database as “incomprehensible”, since the number of offenses and administrative offenses in Bavaria has been falling continuously for years.

There is therefore also criticism of the low-threshold criteria for inclusion in the database. “The decision to save a person […] does not take place on the basis of a single relevant fact, but on the basis of a so-called individual prognosis “, it says according to the information of the” kicker “in the answer to the inquiry there is a risk of sticking stickers “, quoted the” kicker “the defense lawyer Marco Noli from Munich, who is a member of the AG Fananwälte.

The Bavarian State Ministry replied about the use of the file: “The” EASy GS “file is used to obtain personal information about interrelationships and connections between the members of violent scenes in connection with sporting events.” Organized football fans in particular have been fighting against blanket criminalization for years.

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