According to the Ministry of the Interior, 365 criminal offenses occurred in North Rhine-Westphalian indoor and outdoor swimming pools in the first half of 2022. According to the ministry, the figures are still preliminary. They come from the state government’s response to a small request from the AfD parliamentary group.
According to this, by the end of June there were 258 crimes in indoor pools and 107 offenses in outdoor pools – which, however, mostly only opened in May. Very few cases involved violent crime: there was one rape, three dangerous physical injuries and two robbery offenses. 25 times there were simple physical injuries, the other – harmless – crimes were not broken down. Two thirds of the 170 identified perpetrators were German.
The AfD also asked the government for figures from 2019. In the pre-Corona year, violence in North Rhine-Westphalian outdoor pools made headlines. Among other things, the Düsseldorf Rheinbad had been cleared several times. The figures are difficult to compare with 2022, since the statistics recorded twelve months instead of the current six. In fact, the total number of offenses at the end of 2019 was much higher: 2325 crimes, 963 of them in outdoor pools, 1256 indoor pools and 106 on beaches. The latter are in the current statistics as a crime scene at zero.
