European Centre for Counterterrorism and Intelligence Studies, Germany & Netherlands – ECCI
Germany getting tough on knife crime
DW – Germany is introducing tougher laws to combat rising knife crime. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser aims to restrict public knife carrying, but critics find the plans impractical.
The German government has promised tougher knife laws after the police reported a rise in the number of stabbings, especially near train stations — though the statistics remain controversial.
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has called for the law to be changed so that only blades of 6 centimeters (2.36 inches) would be allowed to be carried in public, rather than the current 12 centimeters. An exception would be made for household knives in their original packaging. Switchblades would be banned altogether.
“Knives are used to commit brutal acts of violence that can cause serious injury or death,” Faeser told the ARD public broadcaster in early August. “We need tougher weapons laws and stricter controls.”
The government pronouncement came after police statistics recorded a 5.6% year-on-year rise in cases of serious bodily harm involving a knife, with 8,951 incidents in 2023. The federal police, which is responsible for safety at Germany’s airports and major railway stations, also reported a significant increase in knife attacks in and around stations, with 430 in the first six months of this year.
Controversial stats
But the police have only been collecting knife crime statistics since 2021, and criminologists are wary of defining the latest figures as a trend. Dirk Baier, a German criminologist at the Institute of Delinquency and Crime Prevention in Zurich, said Germany really doesn’t have much data on knife crime at all.
“The police includes both knife attacks that were carried out and threats with knives, so it’s a very vague category,” he told DW. “And it’s only been a short while, so the numbers aren’t really reliable.”
That hasn’t stopped the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) from using the numbers to suggest that the country’s “migration policy” was to blame. “We have exploding foreign crime, youth crime, migrant violence, because we have open borders,” AfD co-leader Alice Weidel told public broadcaster ZDF in July.
Meanwhile, the German media has become increasingly interested in knife crime in the past few months, following the killing in May of a policeman in Mannheim by an Afghan refugee, in what appears to have been an Islamist motivated attack on an anti-Islamist activist.
But criminologists don’t see a link between violent crime and immigrant background. Though non-Germans are disproportionately represented in police knife crime statistics, that in itself is not a very helpful insight, argued Baier.
“If we look closer at the group of non-Germans, we find very different groups of people: There are Eastern Europeans, North Africans, we have South Americans, we have people of Arab background,” he said. “Those are very different cultures, so we can’t say there’s anything like a specific ‘knife’ culture, or an ethnic background that has a direct connection to carrying knives.”
“We really need to talk less about the country they came from, but the circumstances of their lives,” he added. “In what milieus do they grow up? Among which friends, that they think it’s important to carry knives? What’s their educational background? We need to look at their social circumstances, and not get stuck on nationality.”
