Gun law
Faeser wants to extend knife ban – this is what the police say

In Hamburg, these knives were already confiscated after the previous knife ban
© Malte Christians / DPA
The number of knife attacks in Germany is increasing. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser therefore wants to tighten gun laws. But can the police actually enforce a knife ban?
In Germany in 2023 there were exactly 8,951 cases of dangerous and serious bodily harm in which knives were used – either to injure someone or to threaten to do so. At least that is the number of crimes included in the police statistics. That is an increase of 5.6 percent compared to the previous year. According to a report in “Bild am Sonntag”, the Federal Police again registered more knife attacks in the first half of 2024 – especially at train stations.
But is that realistic at all? Can the police, given the lack of staff and overtime, carry out these additional checks? “The police will certainly not be able to enforce a general ban on carrying knives in public with the existing staffing levels,” says Rainer Wendt, Federal Chairman of the German Police Union (DPolG), to the star“Legal provisions of this kind pursue a general preventive purpose, namely to ensure that potential offenders change their behaviour and leave their knives at home through the publicised threat of punishment. However, there are considerable doubts as to whether this will succeed.”
Controls of the knife ban
Wendt describes how the checks are carried out: “In practice, people are stopped, checked and if necessary, their bags, backpacks or even their outer clothing are searched.” The police decide who is checked based on experience. “It is obvious that the obviously older woman is less likely to be targeted by the police than potentially conspicuous, aggressive, loud groups of young men,” Wendt said about the star.
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Faeser also called on municipalities to set up more weapon and knife-free zones. The Hanseatic City of Hamburg has already done this: A weapon ban applies around the Reeperbahn in St. Pauli, at Hansaplatz in the St. Georg district and, for several months, at the main train station. A press spokesman for the Hamburg police draws attention to star-Request a positive result: The police are thus “able to remove weapons and dangerous objects from circulation. Every single one of these objects is one too many”. It can be assumed that further crimes that would have been associated with the use of weapons or dangerous objects could be prevented, said the spokesman. At Hamburg Central Station alone, “350 knives and over 150 other prohibited objects have been seized” since October 2023.
Police lack personnel for controls
Trade unionist Wendt also sees knife ban zones as generally positive: “It has been shown that the easier possibility of carrying out such checks increases the pressure to check and after a short time leads to a drop in the ‘success rate’, i.e. fewer knives are carried in these zones.” However, he makes a critical note: “In the area of train stations alone, the federal police are short of around 3,500 officers, and the respective state police can only carry out focused operations in known crime-ridden areas.”
At the same time, Wendt criticizes municipalities, regulatory authorities and the judiciary: “Municipalities must set up control forces and strengthen their regulatory authorities, public prosecutors must be able to quickly bring charges after knife attacks; dropping the case must only be an exception. In addition, the courts must find comprehensible judgments that do justice to the degree of criminal wrongdoing of such an act.”
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His conclusion: “The police alone will not solve the problem of ‘knife crime’, no matter how many personnel they have. If the other actors continue as before, such a law will not be worth the paper it is written on.”