When you work in a refugee home, you get used to hearing stories that rattle your naive belief that Austria is a first-world country with a police force free of corruption - the image of the police as your friend and helper. There are just too many stories.

Like the story of a refugee who was caught dealing drugs. The police brought him back to the home, and went to his room. Even though he handed them his key, and his roommate was present, they decided to instead smash the door to pieces, and turn the entire room upside down. When I asked my colleagues if they didn't feel that a call to their superior was necessary, I just got shrugs. Don't mess with the police - or they will really mess with you. Like show up in the middle of the night, and have everyone in the home line up for inspection, night after night.

Or the story of another refugee, who was also caught dealing drugs, brought back, and his room searched. The officer in charge twisted his arm behind his back so badly that the man was begging for his life, afraid he may get his arm broken.

A few weeks later, Mike Brennan, a teacher at the Vienna International School, was beat up because he was apparently mistaken for a drug dealer, and police protocol is to push suspected drug dealers to the group, and beat them.

Then there is the annual WKR Ball in the Vienna Hofburg. Right in the centre of Vienna, the creme de la creme of the Austrian right wing dance their troubles away. For a few years now, protests have been staged outside the Hofburg against this event. A few thousand people would show up, most of them peacefully protesting the goings-on, while most of Austria just accepted it as part of life. As always, a few protesters would take things too far, do some damage, possibly even pick a fight with the police.

This year, for the first time, the protest at the Hofburg was cancelled by the police. When protesters nonetheless formed further outside the centre with the intention of walking towards the centre, police trapped them - and any innocent bystanders that happened to be in the area, and locked them in for hours. If you didn't have your passport on you (and who doesn't take it when going shopping?), you didn't leave the area. The police somehow felt the need to invovle the WEGA special unit. Over 600 people were arrested, and the police was pretty brutal. There is a good collection of statments by witnesses here. Why the police felt the need to so vehemently beat down a peaceful demonstration is beyond me.

And then, today, comes yet another account of the absolutely inacceptable behavior of the police: a colleague's mother's shop was broken into and robbed. The mother was taped to a chair, and had to watch the robbers clear out her shop in front of her eyes. A terrible situation, there is no doubt, and the perpetrators need to be caught and brought to justice. Yet, the reaction by the police was the truly shocking part: the fact that the perpetrators were black was enough for the police to go looking for the first black guy they could find, bring him into the shop, and start questioning him. When the innocent bystander complained, they started insulting him, before kicking him out of the shop again.

Are these isolated events? Maybe. But the fact that these stories are starting to pile up, and the absolutely uncalled-for reaction of the police to the demonstration against the WKR Ball don't bode well.

Does the police force attract the kind of people who have racist attitudes already? Possibly. It certainly gives these people power over others they can easily abuse. I hope that there isn't an underlying connection between these incidents, that the police are somehow as a whole becoming more violent and racist. Because we've had this before, and it didn't end well...