A knife attack in the city of Solingen on Friday night has refocussed attention on Germany's laws regulating the carrying of knives in public. "It is clear to me that our security services must have more powers to detect such perpetrators early on, especially in the digital space," the deputy chairman of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group, Dirk Wiese, told the Rheinische Post newspaper on Saturday. "We also need to finally make progress on knife bans."

Earlier this month, the German government 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 (SPD) 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 9.7% 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."

How to police knife crime?

Given this, Baier is skeptical that Faeser's law will make much difference in the long term. Nevertheless, he argued that it might at least simplify Germany's legislation, which is currently very complicated, as each state has its own rules about what kinds of knives are and aren't allowed.

"It's a good signal, so to speak," he said. "But if you're looking for the benefit in terms of preventing knife crime, then I would say that it has no benefit." People who carry dangerous knives will continue to do so, whether they are legal or not, Baier argued.

That speaks to the more immediate problem of how to police possible attacks in the first place. Lars Wendland, chairperson of the German police union GdP, welcomed Faeser's proposal in principle, but argued that police needed more than just a legal change to work effectively. "What use is a tightening of the law if we can't enforce it?" he told DW. "We also have to look at whether we have the personnel and material to implement it."

Wendland thinks facial recognition surveillance and allowing the police to carry out random checks in certain "no weapons zones" would be a good start. But those measures haven't been mentioned by Faeser yet — and it's doubtful that they would even be within her remit, since designating such zones is typically the job of local governments.

No weapons zones have been introduced in certain German cities, and while there is little evidence that they actually led to a reduction in violent crime, according to Baier, they do appear to make people feel safer. "There have been scientific studies on no weapons zones in Leipzig and Wiesbaden — both have shown that criminality hasn't dropped noticeably. But populations felt more safety. I think that's most probably because more police were around," he said.

Knife crime has become a major issue elsewhere in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom, where the government also introduced new bans on large bladed weapons late last year.

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

Editor's note: The previous version of this article has been modified to remove a factual inaccuracy. The article was updated on August 24, 2024 to reflect reaction to a knife attack in Solingen.

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