Police forced a Copenhagen doctor to stay away from an apparently seriously ill young man who had fallen to the pavement as officers said the doctor, who is of ethnic Turkish origin, looked like a trouble-maker and threatened to arrest him if he did not move on.

“What offends me most is that I was not able to live up to my oath because of a police officer’s execution of his power. He was not able to see the fatal consequences that could have,” Özgür Serin tells the Danish medical journal Ugeskrift for Læger.

“It is infuriating that what could be his discrimination against me could affect a patient who needs help,” he adds.

Serin described the events that took place after he and friends had left the Park Café in Østerbro in Copenhagen.

On his way out of the café, Serin noticed an unwell young man lying on the pavement: “He was obviously unwell. I could hear from his friends that he has taken some drugs and that they have never seen him this way before,” Serin recounts, adding he went to see what he could do to help the young man.

“I just managed to get there when a police officer grabbed my arm and told me to go away,” Serin tells Ugeskrift for Læger, adding the officer said Serin, who had not drunk any alcohol, was drunk and anyway off-duty.

“I told the officer that I had not been drinking and quietly insisted that I should be allowed to check the young man, who I was quite worried about. Instead I was told that I looked like someone out to make trouble and I would be arrested if I didn’t go on my way,” Serin says.

“When the officer then asked for my ID card and personal register number and then said ‘ I don’t believe that someone like you is a doctor’ I got very, very angry,” he says, adding he has never previously experienced someone questioning whether he is a doctor on the basis of his ethnic background.

The National Board of Health says that doctors have a duty to help people who are unwell.

“But doctors do not have a duty to treat people, and if another authority such as the police refuse help, that is their decision,” the Board says, adding it will not comment whether the police decision on the case at hand was the correct one.

The Copenhagen Police tells Ugeskrift for Læger that the incident is being treated as a ‘behavioural complaint’ adding it is being handled by the Police Director’s secretariat.

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