Trade fair attacks repeatedly attract a great deal of public attention. After all, the police can point out that many perpetrators are being identified.
Erfurt (dpa/th) – Thuringia’s police can point to a high clear-up rate for crimes involving knives. The police were able to clear up around 90 percent of around 940 of these crimes in 2021, according to a response from the Ministry of the Interior to a request from left-wing member of parliament Sascha Bilay. Figures for 2022 are not yet available. Crimes involving knives are also referred to, for example, when someone merely carries a knife with them in the event of a theft. Knife attacks, on the other hand, are much rarer.
In particular, when people have been stabbed with knives, the clear-up rate is high. The Ministry of the Interior refers to cases in which people were murdered or killed with knives and in which all of the crimes known to the police could be solved.
Even with crimes that the police classified as serious or dangerous bodily harm, the clearance rate was very high at around 95 percent.
Both Bilay and the Ministry of the Interior point out that the number of knife crimes registered by the police is not equivalent to the number of actual knife attacks that investigators found between January and December 2021 in Bavaria. For example, among the approximately 940 knife crimes in 2021 there are six simple thefts in which the suspects carried a knife with them but did not use it against people when they stole things.
The Interior Ministry wrote in its reply that there was a nationwide uniform definition of the police for knife attacks. According to this, a crime is only considered a knife attack if another person is actually attacked or at least threatened with a knife. “On the other hand, simply carrying a knife is not enough to be recorded as a knife attack.” After that, only 124 offenses were classified as knife attacks.
Crimes in which knives were used against people have repeatedly attracted a great deal of public attention: For example, a case in Erfurt in October 2021 in which a man in the middle of the city injured another man with a knife so badly that he later died. The district court of Erfurt acquitted the man who had used the knife about a year after the incident of causing bodily harm resulting in death. The court saw it as proven that the man had acted in self-defense after he was said to have been beaten and choked by the man who later died.