130 Police Leaders Converge on Auschwitz: Inside the New Transatlantic Pact Against Hate Crimes

On April 14, 2026, approximately 130 senior police leaders from across Europe and North America marched through the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau alongside Holocaust survivors and victims of modern antisemitic attacks [1]. They had been selected by the International March of the Living's leadership to lead the annual procession — a first for any law enforcement delegation [2]. Five days earlier, in Berlin, the organizations those leaders represent had signed a memorandum of understanding launching a five-year cooperative framework: "Not on Our Watch — The Democratic Policing Initiative" [3].

The initiative responds to what organizers describe as an unprecedented spike in hate-motivated violence, particularly antisemitism, since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel [1]. But the scope of the agreement — cross-border intelligence-sharing, joint training, and coordinated threat response — raises questions that the public announcements have not fully answered: What legal authority does this framework carry? How will nations with incompatible hate crime definitions cooperate? And who ensures that expanded policing powers are not turned against legitimate dissent?

Who Signed, and Who Didn't

The Berlin MOU was signed on April 9, 2026, by seven law enforcement organizations and two university partners [3]. The signatories include the German Police Union (GdP), the European Federation of Police Unions (EU.Pol), the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), the National Sheriffs' Association (NSA), the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA), the Small & Rural Law Enforcement Executives Association (SRLEEA), and the International Police Delegation [3].

Academic partners Rutgers University's Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience and the University of Virginia's Center for Public Safety and Justice organized the initiative and the Kraków convening [4].

The geographic footprint is limited to Europe and North America [3]. No signatories represent law enforcement from Asia, Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East. Among European nations, French, British, and Scandinavian police organizations are not listed as signatories, though individual officers from those countries may have attended the Kraków gathering. The absence of the UK's National Police Chiefs' Council and France's Direction Générale de la Police Nationale — two countries with some of Europe's highest hate crime caseloads — is notable given that France saw recorded racial offenses nearly double from 1,636 in 2022 to 3,144 in 2024 [5].

What the Agreement Commits To — and What It Does Not

The MOU establishes five operational priorities: early threat detection and cross-border intelligence-sharing; joint training on community protection, de-escalation, and ethical decision-making; coordinated responses to emerging extremist threats; reinforcement of democratic values and constitutional policing; and officer well-being and resilience support [3].

Paul Goldenberg, chair of the initiative and deputy director of the Rutgers Miller Center, described the rationale in Berlin: "History shows that democratic institutions rarely fail all at once; they erode" [4].

The agreement is a memorandum of understanding between professional associations and academic institutions — not a treaty between sovereign governments. MOUs of this kind typically create frameworks for cooperation but lack the force of international law. No government ministry or national legislature ratified the document. This distinction matters: the intelligence-sharing and coordinated operational responses described in the MOU would, in practice, still require authorization under each country's domestic legal framework before data could flow across borders [3].

No funding details, projected budgets, or identified underwriters — governmental or private — have been publicly disclosed for the initiative [1][3][4]. The transition from "annual convening to permanent operational alliance," as described in press materials, implies ongoing institutional costs, but the financial architecture remains opaque [4].

The Scale of the Problem: Hate Crimes by the Numbers

The initiative arrives against a backdrop of measurably rising hate crime across the participating nations.

In the United States, the FBI reported 11,679 hate crime incidents in 2024, the second-highest total since data collection began in 1991, following 12,498 incidents in 2023 [6]. Race and ethnicity-based bias accounted for half of all incidents, with anti-Black hate crimes comprising 3,004 incidents. Religion-based hate crimes — nearly 70% of which targeted Jewish individuals — reached a record 1,938 anti-Jewish incidents [7].

Source: FBI Uniform Crime Report

Data as of Aug 5, 2025CSV

The Anti-Defamation League's broader tracking, which includes harassment and vandalism beyond what is reported to police, recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, a 344% increase over five years and an 893% increase over the past decade [7].

Source: Anti-Defamation League

Data as of Aug 5, 2025CSV

Source: FBI / Axios

Data as of Aug 5, 2025CSV

Across the Atlantic, 47 OSCE participating states submitted hate crime data to the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in 2024 [8]. Civil society organizations contributed reports on 12,714 hate incidents that year [8]. The most significant surges targeted Jewish and Muslim communities, with European governments reporting approximately 9,000 antisemitic and 6,000 anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2023 [5].

In Poland — the summit's host nation — the government reported a 41% increase in hate crimes in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, rising from 384 to 543 alleged offenses [9]. Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek announced the creation of specialized prosecutor units in 11 district offices to handle crimes "motivated by prejudice," a measure he said "will apply to hate in the broadest sense, regardless of whether the victims are Ukrainians, Jews, Roma or Polish citizens with whose views people disagree" [9].

LGBTQ+ communities face parallel trends. In a 2024 EU Fundamental Rights Agency survey, 13% of LGBTI respondents reported experiencing violence for being LGBTI in the preceding five years, with attacks on transgender individuals rising from 17% in 2019 to 20% in 2023 [8].

The Definitional Problem: What Counts as a Hate Crime?

One of the most consequential obstacles to cross-border coordination is that participating nations define "hate crime" in fundamentally incompatible ways.

The United States does not recognize "hate speech" as a legal category. Under the First Amendment, Holocaust denial is constitutionally protected expression [10]. Germany's Section 130 of the Penal Code, by contrast, criminalizes denial or trivialization of genocide committed under the National Socialist regime [10]. France's Gayssot Law makes it an offense to deny crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg Charter [10]. At least 16 European countries criminalize Holocaust denial; the United States, the United Kingdom, and several other OSCE members do not [10].

The EU's Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA requires member states to criminalize incitement to violence or hatred based on race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin, and includes provisions on publicly condoning, denying, or grossly trivializing crimes of genocide [11]. But implementation varies significantly by state — and the framework does not apply to non-EU signatories like the United States [11].

The MOU does not publicly address how these definitional gaps will be reconciled. When German police flag a social media post denying the Holocaust as a criminal matter, and their American counterpart's legal system treats the same post as protected speech, what does "coordinated operational response" mean in practice? The press materials from Berlin and Kraków do not answer this question [3][4].

Poland itself illustrates the tension. The Tusk government's 2025 attempt to expand hate crime protections to cover sexual orientation, disability, age, and gender was referred to the constitutional court by then-President Andrzej Duda. The court ruled it unconstitutional, finding the legislation "failed to accurately define hate speech" and "contravened the principle of free speech which is enshrined in the Polish constitution" [9]. Successor President Karol Nawrocki pledged not to sign measures he viewed as threatening free speech [9].

Civil Liberties: The Mission Creep Question

Civil liberties organizations have long raised concerns about the application of hate crime and hate speech frameworks to legitimate political expression.

The expression "hate speech" has no agreed definition in international law [12]. This ambiguity creates room for expansive interpretation. Former ACLU president Nadine Strossen has argued that hate speech laws, in both developing and developed nations, have been used to persecute minority viewpoints and critics of government — and that efforts to censor hate speech can produce the opposite of their intended effect, with disadvantaged and ethnic minorities disproportionately charged under the very laws designed to protect them [12].

The ACLU's position reflects a specifically American legal tradition, but the concern has European echoes. The European Parliament has acknowledged the tension between combating hate speech and protecting freedom of expression, noting that Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that freedom of expression "carries with it duties and responsibilities" — a framing that permits greater regulation than the U.S. First Amendment allows [11][13].

The "Not on Our Watch" MOU lists "reinforcing democratic values and constitutional policing" among its five operational priorities [3]. But no specific safeguards, oversight mechanisms, or independent review processes have been publicly disclosed. The agreement does not describe, for example, how intelligence shared under the framework could be audited, who would adjudicate disputes over what constitutes a legitimate hate crime referral versus political speech, or what recourse individuals would have if data shared across borders was misused [3][4].

The absence of these details does not prove that safeguards are lacking — they may exist in unpublished operational annexes or be under development. But for an initiative built on cross-border information-sharing about offenses that sit at the boundary between criminal conduct and protected expression, the gap between stated commitments and disclosed mechanisms is substantial.

Track Record: What Previous Frameworks Have Achieved

The initiative positions itself as moving "from annual convening to permanent operational alliance" [4]. But it enters a field with existing players and mixed results.

Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, supports cross-border investigations into organized crime, terrorism, and cybercrime. However, Europol does not have a dedicated hate crime task force, and hate crimes are not explicitly mentioned in its core mandate [14]. The agency's programming documents for 2024–2026 encourage member states to "step up efforts to prevent discriminatory attitudes by law enforcement authorities" and "boost the credibility of law enforcement work against hate crimes," but these are exhortations, not operational mechanisms with measurable outcomes [14].

ODIHR's annual hate crime reporting is the most comprehensive international effort, with 47 states submitting data in 2024 [8]. Yet ODIHR itself notes that "most states would benefit from raising awareness and building capacity among police, prosecutors and judges," and that many lack national hate crime training programs in police academies [8]. The gap between data collection and enforcement action remains wide.

The "Not on Our Watch" initiative's potential advantage is its focus on professional police associations rather than government bureaucracies. Organizations like the IACP and the German Police Union represent operational leadership — the chiefs and commanders who allocate resources and set enforcement priorities. Whether this translates to cross-border prosecutions or remains at the level of training exchanges and symbolic marches is the open question.

Whose Voices Shaped the Agenda?

The Kraków program centered on antisemitism: a tour of the Jewish Quarter, Auschwitz visits, testimonies from Holocaust survivors and survivors of antisemitic shootings, and the March of the Living [1]. Speakers included Abbie Talmoud and Catherine Szkop from the Embassy of Israel, and Jeanne Hengemuhle, Superintendent of the New Jersey State Police [1].

This focus reflects the initiative's origins in the post-October 7 antisemitism surge. But hate crime data shows that multiple communities face severe and rising threats. Anti-Muslim hate crimes numbered approximately 6,000 across European governments' reports in 2023 [5]. Anti-Black hate crimes remain the single largest category in the FBI's U.S. data, at 3,004 incidents in 2024 [6]. Roma communities face persistent discrimination across Central and Eastern Europe. LGBTQ+ individuals report rising rates of violence [8].

The EU's High Level Group on combating hate speech and hate crime operates in coordination with strategies on antisemitism, racism, LGBTIQ equality, anti-Muslim hatred, and anti-Gypsyism [15]. Muslim organizations consulted by the Council of Europe have specifically flagged incitement to violence and death threats as priority concerns [15]. Jewish community organizations and the ADL have called for disaggregated data collection and stronger enforcement [7]. LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have pressed European governments to recognize sexual orientation and gender identity-based hate crimes consistently across member states [8].

Whether formal consultations with Muslim, Roma, LGBTQ+, or Black European community organizations preceded the summit's design has not been publicly documented. The available press materials and program descriptions do not mention input from these groups in shaping the agenda, though this does not confirm their exclusion from behind-the-scenes planning [1][3][4].

Poland as Host: Symbolic and Complicated

Poland's selection as host carries both symbolic weight and irony. Auschwitz-Birkenau — the site of the largest mass murder in human history — provides an unimpeachable moral backdrop for a conference on hate-motivated violence. "The Holocaust did not happen overnight," New Jersey State Police Superintendent Jeanne Hengemuhle said at the event. "There were small, incremental changes that ultimately led to what took place" [1].

But Poland's own record on hate crime legislation is contested. The country's hate crime numbers are low in absolute terms — fewer than 1,000 reported offenses annually, compared to 70,000 burglaries and 100,000 fraud cases [9]. The constitutional court's rejection of expanded hate crime protections in 2025 reflects genuine domestic disagreement about where criminal law should draw the line between combating prejudice and protecting speech [9].

The Ukrainian community in Poland, numbering approximately 2 million, has reported escalating hostility, prompting Ukraine's government to formally request that Poland strengthen enforcement against xenophobic behavior toward Ukrainians [9]. Justice Minister Żurek's announcement of specialized prosecutor units was a direct response [9].

What Comes Next

The "Not on Our Watch" initiative has established a framework and a mandate. Its signatories represent organizations collectively speaking for hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers across two continents. The Kraków gathering demonstrated capacity for symbolic action — 130 police leaders marching at Auschwitz carries undeniable moral force.

The harder work lies ahead. Turning a memorandum of understanding into operational cooperation requires resolving the definitional conflicts that separate American and European legal traditions, establishing transparent governance structures, securing sustainable funding, building in civil liberties safeguards, and demonstrating that this initiative produces outcomes — investigations, prosecutions, measurable reductions in hate-motivated violence — that existing frameworks have not.

As Collin County, Texas Sheriff Jim Skinner put it at the event: "We all have an obligation to dig deep and make sure hate doesn't happen on our watch" [1]. The question is whether the institutional architecture now matches the rhetoric.