By Gunnar Schupelius
The government must protect the population from brute force, but Gunnar Schupelius believes that it is no longer doing enough to fulfill this obligation.
The interior ministers of all 16 federal states will meet in Berlin for three days, from Wednesday to Friday. They are looking for ways to increase internal security.
In the foreground is the increasing knife violence. The interior ministers of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein are calling for a ban on knives on the train. Brockstedt’s double murder is still in your bones.
On January 25, the Palestinian Ibrahim A. (33) stabbed the student Ann-Marie (17) and her boyfriend Danny (19) on the Hamburg-Kiel regional train and seriously injured four other passengers with a knife. A 54-year-old woman who was temporarily in an induced coma due to the severity of her injuries committed suicide a few days ago.
But the demand for a knife ban on the train seems helpless. How should that be controlled? It would be much more important to find out who is actually stabbing with the knife and why this is happening more and more often.
The question of the perpetrators, however, is reluctant to be asked and is preferred to be ignored. The interior ministers are talking about the proverbial elephant, a fact that everyone knows but nobody wants to talk about.
The fact is what the crime statistics show. Let’s take Berlin as an example. In 2022, the police registered a total of 3,317 “knife attacks” here. 2,428 suspects were found, of whom 1,234 had foreign nationality, i.e. more than half.
At the end of 2022, the proportion of foreigners in Berlin’s population was 24.3 percent. In other words, in the case of knife attacks, twice as many foreigners were perpetrators than German nationals.
The number of attacks with a knife is steadily increasing in Berlin. 2600 such acts were registered in 2020, 2777 in 2021 and 3317 in 2022.
Police chief Barbara Slowik pointed out at the beginning of the year that young people and children were also using knives as weapons more and more frequently. “Unfortunately, that has increased,” she said.
The stabbers are mostly “in mental crisis or exceptional situations”. They have “experienced violence themselves more often than average”. This is the conclusion reached by the experts at the Federal and State Criminological Center in Wiesbaden. These vulnerable people would have to be “better caught”. So they need more supervision.
But that is exactly what is not possible. Because more and more men “in psychological crisis or exceptional situations” who “have experienced violence themselves” are entering the country uncontrolled. By the time they become conspicuous, it’s already too late.
Monitoring doesn’t work. The Brockstedt case is an example of this: The murderer Ibrahim A. from the regional train was registered as a criminal, but nevertheless disappeared unnoticed from the authorities’ radar.
It was the same with 29-year-old Mouhammed N. from Iraq, who in April 2022 at Ostkreuz station rammed a knife into the back of a waiting passenger whom he did not know. Mouhammed N. was convicted five times and was wanted on an arrest warrant.
The interior ministers have a duty to protect the population from brute force. This includes border protection. But despite all the scandals and human catastrophes, that still doesn’t exist.
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