More than half of junior staff joining the police in the German capital of Berlin have insufficient knowledge of the German language.
This was disclosed on September 5 by the Berlin police following a request for information by German news portal Nius.
Of the 240 new cadets who have joined the force so far this year, 132 needed remedial German classes – 55 per cent of the total. Only 108 police cadets managed to finish their first term without extra tutoring in the German language.
The numbers – while surprising – are apparently the norm in the German capital.
A Berlin police spokesperson said that on average half of new entrants have to take remedial German classes during their first semester, with the share dropping over the course of the cadets’ time with the force.
The spokesperson told Nius the police saw “declining written language skills” with junior staff. This was not a problem specific to police cadets, though, but affected “all of society”, citing the lack of qualified teaching staff and “heterogeneity in classes” in Berlin schools as underlying causes.
The spokesperson added: “Motivation to learn spelling rules is declining, as spell checkers in word processing programmes, auto-correct and artificial intelligence supposedly make this unnecessary.”
The prevalence of sub-par German language skills may also be linked to the disproportionately large share of police cadets with foreign roots.
In 2022, 37 per cent of new entrants to the Berlin police force said they had a migrant background. This was by far the highest percentage among the seven German States for which this information is available.
Around 4 per cent of all German police officers nationwide had a migrant background in 2022. Newer statistics are not available.
The recruitment policies of Berlin police have recently made the news after a 20-year-old drunk police cadet allegedly beat up a 49-year-old African father in front of the latter’s young son and hurled racist insults at the man.
According to German news reports on August 8, the cadet came from a Turkish family.
