-Say his name! -George Floyd!
-Amid the protest wave
following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis,
calls for broader changes have once again gained momentum
in the United States.
-Disarm the police!
-Disarm the police! -Disarm --
-At rallies across the nation,
protesters have chanted the slogan "defund the police."
Some mean this in a literal sense.
Others use it as a rallying cry to broadly demand police reform.
But what would such reforms look like?
It helps to take a look at other countries
that have made changes to prevent police brutality.
Sweden, for example,
has narrowed the role of its police force
and is now deploying mental-health nurses
to some emergencies.
And German police officers
have to go through two to three years of training
focusing on de-escalation techniques.
Even after they graduate,
they still need to attend seminars multiple times a year.
International comparisons
of police and justice systems all always tricky,
considering that the US, for example, is estimated
to have six times more civilian firearms
per capita than Germany.
Like most countries,
Germany is not immune to allegations of police brutality.
But in comparison with the US, accusations of abuse of power
appear to be on a very different scale.
The US has around four times the population of Germany,
but in 2018,
US officers shot and killed approximately 990 people,
whereas German officers killed 11.
That means over 20 times more people
were shot and killed per capita in the US than in Germany.
To understand why those differences exist,
I traveled to a police-training school
in the eastern German state of Brandenburg.
Rainer Grieger is the president of the school.
When he saw the recent images of US protests on German TV,
he responded to an e-mail from the Obama Foundation
about the protests over George Floyd's death,
and he offered his advice on police reform.
[indistinct shouting]
He says he didn't hear back from anyone,
but he still thinks that he and his colleagues
may have some valuable ideas
that could help their US counterparts.
-As I saw the video with Mr Floyd,
my first thought was
"These colleagues are no police colleagues.
These are murderers."
In the moment, in Germany,
when we have some people in our custody,
we are responsible for the health of these people,
we ask them, "Can you breathe? Do you have any pain?"
-Although there is little data
on the amount of de-escalation training US officers receive,
American public media found in a 2017 investigation
that officers in most police departments
in the state of Georgia
had less than one hour of de-escalation training
over the previous five years.
Until the last few years,
Georgia did not have mandatory
in-service de-escalation training for police,
while in Germany, police officers spent more time
learning de-escalation techniques than how to shoot.
In Brandenburg,
the police wants to show me one of their routine exercises.
In the simulation, a suspect is caught
while trying to break into a car.
-Brandenburg police. What are you doing here?
-What do you want? -Knife!
-Follow my orders.
Drop the knife.
-Then a moment of relief.
The suspect complies with the orders
and drops his knife.
The officers stop pointing their guns directly at him.
That is the German approach.
As soon as a criminal
or someone who is about to be arrested de-escalates,
the police also de-escalates in that sense.
But in a second, more tense scenario,
the suspect ignores the officers' warnings
after dropping his knife,
and he continues to approach the officers.
They have only seconds to decide,
"Does he have a second knife, maybe even a firearm?"
To de-escalate the situation,
the officers decide to put away their guns
and arm themselves with a baton and pepper spray instead.
The pepper spray is used. -Aah!
-Now they're putting his arms on is back
and telling him to put his head on the side,
which is really crucial,
because it means that they're able to see
if something is wrong with him, if there are any problems,
if he can't breathe or anything.
-Ahh! -Okay.
-[The suspect] can still respond to the officers,
so we know that he's not fighting for his life.
Those are crucial signals for us that we try to watch out for.
-Throughout the entire exercise,
the officers explain to the suspect
what they will do next in order to calm him.
Watching from the sidelines,
Senior Police Officer Lux tells me that the aim is
that the suspect feels as safe as possible.
-He's in our custody,
which means we have a duty of care for the suspect.
The police [should be] a friend and helper,
even in such a situation.
One should never forget that.
-But what if the suspect
had drawn a second knife or a firearm?
At the shooting range, the officers want to show me
how the worst-case scenario could have played out.
But to my surprise,
their shooting range is unlike any I've ever seen before.
So, what's interesting here
is that the goal is to not shoot,
even though it is a shooting range.
-[shouts in German]
-In a blue-screen room next door,
an actor simulates the same scenario
we just observed outside.
But now officers have real loaded firearms in their hands.
If they decide to shoot the suspect,
they only hit a virtual projection of an actor.
But for the officers who train here,
the experience can still be nerve-racking.
-The person who is acting as the suspect
can hear the officers, and they can hear him.
That way we can practice as close to reality as possible
and train and develop
certain patterns of behavior,
which the officers can later draw from under stress
if possible with the same goal: To not shoot.
-When a German officer
does shoot and kill a suspect, however,
the incident automatically triggers
an investigation by an agency
into whether that decision was warranted.
Many of today's German police practices
were developed after World War II,
when the country's institutions were rebuilt
to create a more robust separation of powers.
The Brandenburg police-training school itself
used to house SS Nazi troops during World War II,
and it's built right next to
the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp,
which is today a memorial site.
For the police-training school's recruits,
a visit to the camp is mandatory.
While the West largely helped rebuild Germany
and its institutions after World War II,
police officers here say it is now the US
that can learn from contemporary Germany.
But they caution against defunding entire police forces.
What do you think when you hear the slogan "defund the police"?
-Nonsense. Perhaps you need much more money
to get a change of progress and culture.
-The German model, they say, is costly.
The budget for this school alone is over $50 million annually.
Meanwhile, Sweden spends less of its GDP
on policing than Germany does,
but experts there are saying that the reason for that
is a deliberate narrowing of the role of the police force.
They say the aim is to improve services overall.
In the United States,
budget cuts to psychiatric services
have resulted in police taking on a greater role
in dealing with mentally-ill people.
Sweden has gone the opposite way.
In the capital of Stockholm, mental-health professionals
have largely replaced police officers
when responding to mental-health emergencies,
as long as there is no apparent risk
to any of the personnel involved.
One advantage Sweden has, of course,
is that its tougher gun laws
mean that far fewer people are armed there
than in the United States,
so nurses take far fewer risks when they respond.
The Swedish method seeks to free up police resources,
but it's also meant to avoid provoking individuals
who may feel threatened by the presence of officers.
Since the project was founded in Stockholm five years ago,
there's been not a single incident
of a patient violently attacking the nurses.
What was the original idea behind introducing
the mental-health ambulance in Stockholm?
-It was actually from the police department,
in conjunction with the psychiatric emergency services.
These patients now get high-quality assessment
by trained healthcare professionals
outside of hospitals.
Prison and justice models vary across Europe,
and many of the experts we spoke to here in Germany,
but also in Sweden and other countries
caution that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
But the experiences gathered abroad
could serve as a starting point for debate
many protesters in the US say is long overdue.