Before the Crime
Minority Report had precogs. Bavaria’s new Polizeiaufgabengesetz—the police powers law passed in May 2018 with the CSU’s parliamentary majority—has the concept of drohende Gefahr: imminent danger. Under this framework, police can intervene before any crime has been committed. Residence restrictions, electronic ankle monitors, frozen bank accounts—all available as tools based on suspicion alone. The film was science fiction. The law is not.
The scope is extraordinary. Police can now access cloud storage, not just local devices, and can not only read the data but delete or modify it. They can intercept and block telecommunications preventively. They can seize mail without a judicial warrant in emergencies. They can share personal data with private companies and foreign intelligence services. At demonstrations—even where no crimes are expected—they can film using automated pattern-recognition systems and, under certain conditions, facial recognition. The law explicitly permits all of this.
The DNA provisions are perhaps the most troubling piece. The law allows DNA analysis for what it calls "biogeographical origin"—using genetics to infer ethnicity. Researchers have repeatedly questioned whether the technology is sufficiently developed for reliable use. Civil liberties experts questioned its constitutionality during the parliamentary hearings. The CSU passed it anyway, apparently satisfied that the objections were manageable.
The official rationale is counterterrorism. It’s always counterterrorism. The pattern is familiar enough by now: sweeping surveillance powers introduced under the cover of a genuine threat, subsequently applied to everything else, with surprise expressed when critics notice. Bavaria’s Green party leader Katharina Schulze was direct about the actual motive—this wasn’t a response to any identifiable security gap, she said, but an electoral maneuver. The CSU positioning itself as tough before regional elections. "Surveillance mania," she called it, and I don’t think she was wrong.
What’s striking is that even the police don’t seem to want it. Oliver Malchow, head of the national police union, said publicly that the protests against these new powers revealed something the institution couldn’t afford to ignore: the erosion of public trust. The police depend on that trust to function. A force that can detain, surveil, and freeze assets on the basis of suspicion is not operating in a democratic framework—it’s a security apparatus. Those are different things, and people running the institution know it.
The comparison to China or Turkey isn’t alarmist. It’s structural. Authoritarianism doesn’t arrive complete. It accumulates: each new law expanding the last, each expansion justified by the previous emergency. Bavaria is a wealthy, stable, liberal democracy. And it just gave its police more preemptive powers than any German government has held since 1945. That’s not a rhetorical flourish. That’s what the headline says.
If you live in Bavaria, the options are unpleasant: accept that you are now substantially more transparent to the state than you were last week; become a constitutional lawyer and try to have it overturned before they think of something worse; or leave. The last one is probably the most honest response to what just happened. But most people will choose the first, because most people always do.