“At the time, I naively thought the police were 100% committed to law and order,” he remembers.
His naiveté began to wear off on the academy’s target-shooting grounds while he and his fellow cadets, guns in hand, listened to a lecture from their commander.
“He told us we have to shoot well, because there are many refugees coming to Germany,” Neumeyer recalls. “I thought to myself: ‘Wow. This is very racist.’
“Later, my ethics teacher complained about foreigners celebrating loudly in the city center on New Year’s Eve and that this was his home. These teachers were basically passing their racism on to us cadets.”
Neumeyer tells NPR he finally spoke up one day when an academy teacher used the N-word in class. To his surprise, he remembers his classmates not defending him, but loudly defending their teacher.
“The entire class celebrated it,” he remembers. “And when I spoke up and said, ‘You can’t use that word,’ a fellow cadet banged on his desk and said it’s high time it was acceptable to use that word again.”
Over time, Neumeyer says his fellow cadets ostracized him. He became more disillusioned and, within a year, gave up his dream of becoming an officer.
After leaving, he published text messages on his Instagram account that his fellow cadets had sent to each other. One message, whose phrases rhyme in German, reads: “We’re from Cottbus, not Ghana. We hate all Africans.”
After posting the messages, Neumeyer’s story went viral on social media in Germany, prompting the Saxony Police to conduct an investigation.
In an email to NPR, the Saxony Police says it investigated three cadets accused of sending racist posts over WhatsApp and removed one of them from the police force. The second cadet had already quit, and the third cadet’s role “could not be confirmed as a breach of duty,” it says.
The Saxony Police also conducted an investigation into two teachers as a result of Neumeyer’s complaints and told NPR “no evidence of racist tendencies was found.”
It notes, though, that it brought these cases with the teachers to educate them in how to recognize “xenophobic tendencies.”
Barely a week has passed this year without new revelations of racism or far-right extremism plaguing Germany’s police and security agencies. Whether it’s officers participating in neo-Nazi chat groups or hoarding ammunition to prepare for a doomsday scenario, extremism remains a persistent problem among those who enforce the law in the country.