I’d estimate that tweets in English should be about two orders of magnitude rarer.
They are a bit hard to find because there isn’t any official hashtag until the reaction to the media reports starts and obviously there are tons of unrelated New Year’s Eve and Cologne tweets.
I’m not actually sure what Germany is doing to address this issue, but this seems like a good way to try. Religious freedom is another area that needs to be addressed - I’ve heard a number of reports of intimidation and violence in refugee homes toward those who left Islam. This happened a couple of months ago in our local centre - a 24 year old convert to Christianity was beaten unconscious. He was treated in the hospital my wife works at. The attacker was arrested, but 15-20 others released him and he escaped. The refugee living in our home has also become a Christian, but I haven’t heard of any aggression against him at this point.
While this is not stereotyping refugees as a group, many of their countries of origin have seriously regressive cultural views on religious and gender rights. It seems naive to imagine that this will not also have an effect in the countries they travel to and it has to be addressed as an educational policy (much as it’s taught to the general population in schools and society anyway).
That there are tons #Köln tweets and pictures is not unrelated, though. It’s reported that an organized mob of 1,000 men committed 121 or more crimes. Some outlets are reporting that this was coordinated across cities (and also across other nations like Switzerland and Austria).
To me, there seems to be a large gulf between the magnitude of the reported mob, and the lack of photographic evidence of said mob. And, now that I’m looking at a better twitter search (above), I certainly see dozens who were out and taking pictures and texting on their phones.
Yes, I certainly accept that women were assaulted and violated. It’s a sad fact that happens as baseline events on most days, let alone New Year’s Eve. And I certainly don’t question that multiple women may have been assaulted by a group or groups of men where there were no witnesses or cameras. Unquestionable that some bad shit was done to multiple people.
I do question why there are no videos of german men trying to give the beat down to these “invaders.” Do you all not love World Star Hip Hop as much as Americans?
I also do question why no anti-invader captured any photos of this “horde.” Surely, a video of this mob in action would be a political asset in reversing Merkel’s stance toward asylum seekers. No witnesses from apartment windows?
And if there’s vivid stuff on surveillance cameras, I’m surprised it hasn’t been leaked. Then again, my American standards for officials not-leaking things has been set very low.
I really don’t know what you are looking for. Somehow you don’t seem to buy it, but do you have any specific alternative theories?
We have some admittedly crappy footage of the night. It even shows other people taking videos. Unfortunately I don’t know why there isn’t enough on Youtube for your tastes.
I don’t know why there were no videos, but presumably those were the fights reported by the police.
It mostly took place on the roughly triangular square on the left. Train station on one side, big fat cathedral on the other and a block of businesses on the third.
[quote]And if there’s vivid stuff on surveillance cameras, I’m surprised it hasn’t been leaked.[/quote]We may see that eventually, but realeasing images of suspects requires court approval. The police is catching enough flak as it is. And of course there is a chance that they are in no hurry to release footage that makes them look bad. If on the other hand everything wasn’t so bad after all, then the police would be shouting it from the rooftops.
Nope. I do know there are significant groups on both sides of the pond that would benefit from either a larger or a smaller version of events. As far as my bias, sure I’d rather not have Trump point to these attacks as a reason to vote for him so that he can discriminate against Muslims.
Since Occupy, I’ve found the first-hand real-time information and reports enabled by smartphones and social media very helpful in forming my opinions. The value I place in these has only strengthened with every #BlackLivesMatter and terrorist tragedy that’s happened since. Black Twitter has been especially powerful in getting the word out quick on US police brutality incidents. It’s certainly likely that’s why I’m more impatient to see what was recorded.
Just more information. I’m grateful for you and JS for providing your perspectives as residents.
Was at work, so hadn’t looked there yet. < <-looks-> > Ewww, a 27 min explainer by Sargon of GG fame. alt+f4, alt+f4!
The guy who is staying with us was out in that part of Hamburg during that part of the night - he didn’t see anything that unusual other than a burned-out car. I guess in places like this where there’s a crowd it’s not difficult to put someone in that situation without it being obvious from a distance or someone being able to get incriminating footage.
I wonder if the fact that the men stole objects too could be a good thing? There are apps to record the location of a phone or the face of someone who tries to use it, so anyone who is caught with a smartphone that was stolen in this context will have some explaining to do. If we’re talking about an organised act rather than opportunism, it may be possible to trace these groups.
There has been talk of deportations, but how would that work in practice? Would it even be legally possible to deport a Syrian back to his country of origin?
And it looks like quite a few of the men associated with the attacks were asylum seekers in Germany, as was the failed attacker in Paris. A number of the smartphones stolen during the attacks have been traced to refugee centres or near them too.
I guess it’s not surprising - encouraging mistrust of refugees in Europe is a specific goal of Daesh.
More than 500 criminal complaints in Cologne by this point, 40% of them for sexual assault. Of the 19 men under investigation in Cologne,14 are from Morocco and Algeria. Ten of the suspects are asylum seekers, nine of whom arrived in Germany after September 2015. The other nine are possibly in Germany illegally.
My pitifully minimal German is probably not helping; but from what I’ve read a conviction that would carry a 3+ year sentence is grounds for deportation, as is the judgement that one is actually an economic migrant rather than a legitimate asylum seeker. There are also a variety of rules about what sorts of coercive violence the state authorities aren’t allowed to use during the deportation process; but I haven’t been able to find anything about what happens if someone has a good-enough-for-asylum claim that their country of origin won’t be welcoming them with open arms; but also has a lousy enough rap sheet that German law provides for their deportation.
Given that we generally can’t get EU member states to extradite criminals unless we promise not to pursue the death penalty, I assume that the position isn’t “Well, I guess you didn’t want asylum enough to keep your nose clean. Sucks to be you I guess…”; but I can’t find what it actually is anywhere.
Some things that changed in the last half of 2015: because of security concerns, Canada will only accept women, children, families and gay/bisexual men. Germany has decided that the parts of Afghanistan that aren’t controlled by the Taliban are safe, so refugees will be sent back there (I don’t know what this will mean to our lodger, who has been living in Iran and Germany with his family for many years). As you can imagine, there have been a number of right wing demonstrations in Cologne and elsewhere, as more NYE assaults come to light in other cities too (not just in Germany). Two teenage girls were raped by four Syrian men (a refugee and three teenagers) on the same night in the south of Germany, which just adds to the toxic mess.
Other similar assaults in Sweden over the past two years were possibly covered up by the police due to race, so that’s another data point to erode people’s trust after more evidence that the Cologne police knew about the tension from early in the evening and accusations from many parts of the country that police were instructed not to report crimes by refugees. Germany and Sweden are both strengthening their borders and sending refugees back (about 200/day from Germany). A recent meeting with Angela Merkel’s party showed deep disagreements with the policy of welcoming refugees and right wing parties like Alternative für Deutschland are hoping to see gains in regional elections that will be held in two months - the leader already making direct comparisons with the rape of German women by the Red Army. As @fuzzyfungus commented, it’s really not clear whether Germany will be able to deport asylum seekers to certain countries and some countries may not accept them anyway. They are looking into making deportation easier though.
@KarlS@renke Is that too pessimistic a picture? I’ve been really busy over the last week so I haven’t been able to gauge how much people’s attitude has changed.
I am not sure which aspect you mean specifically. Of course it is a rather ugly situation all around, but it is too early to tell how it will end.
I don’t expect any signficant number of deportations related to this incident. Getting convictions will be hard enough and then there are the issues of safety and human rights situation in the countries of origin. They’ll probably simplify deportation procedures in general though, so presumably someone will be deported for something.
It plays so finely into Daesh’s strategy (it’s in Daesh’s best interest that Arab refugees are treated like shit) that I can’t help wondering if it wasn’t somehow planned.
Can I ask where the number of assailants is coming from? That’s my biggest doubt in the whole story. Not that it didn’t happen, or that even the background of the attackers. The numbers keep going up and down, and don’t seem based on anything more than supposition based on the number of victims. The reality is that people are not good at counting, especially in stressful situations, and a relatively small number of assailants could perpetrate multiple crimes. I’ve seen numbers for assailants numbering at a thousand… you can’t get a thousand people to attend a protest or rally in a large city sometimes. That’s a significant number, even spread out. Especially for something both coordinated and secret.
I think a lot of disparate and unrelated crimes are likely getting lumped in, and stories are getting garbled. I think the responsible thing is to wait for more information.
The official police estimates are: crowd of 400-500 people at 9:00, 1000 at 11:00, square cleared at 11:30, starting to fill again after square is opened at 12:45.
Some of the coverage has latched onto the big number without explaining the context. Those numbers refer to the size of a crowd of similar demographics from which smaller groups form that perpetrated those crimes.
Earlier today there had been 553 police reports including 237 sexual offenses and 23 identified suspects.
I realize that the issue is more obscure abroad. However here we had a week of endless coverage in all media and it was the foremost political issue up to the highest levels. After that honestly it is a bit weird to see people ask about the absolute basics of the official account that have been reported ad nauseam and in the same breath doubt them bordering on some weird kind of preemptive Cologne trutherism.
I am not saying that there won’t be new facts to discover, but I think it would be helpful to have a look at the story that is actually out there at the moment first.
This is what I get for looking at my Facebook feed for news. I was really just looking at paranoid rightwing interpretations. I’ve gotten a better understanding by Googling and have realized that I have been so preoccupied that I’ve been off the news for a while. Though right now I’m having an I-don’t-speak-German problem for more detailed info. I’d like to in the future.
I still think it’s important to wait for more information before taking drastic measures, not that I think anyone here is arguing differently. Mostly, this story is just depressing.
Yeah, I hadn’t seen anything official by BB by the time I started this thread, and I really think this could have a significant influence on the way countries treat refugees - greater than the Paris attacks, because that was just small groups and it’s far easier for people to generalise about refugees based on numbers like these (also, this ties into people’s fears so well that it’s hard to imagine it not being coordinated by a group like Daesh).
@karls I just meant that I was painting quite a gloomy picture of the whole situation and thought that while my information was basically accurate to what is known at this point, I realise that there are going to be groups that want to exaggerate it.
