20260116 Lagebild rechts ausgerichtet

A doctored picture of the situation

Between Christmas and New Year's Eve, the BKA, the Federal Criminal Police Office published its situation report "Violence against police officers". The timing was well chosen, because before New Year's Eve, the media was keen to report on such incidents. Accordingly, BILD and other right-wing media outlets ran headlines with further exaggerations.

Andrej Reisin, freelance journalist at "funk", the youth content network of ARD and ZDF, took a closer look at the figures presented in the linked article. It becomes clear that with 46,367 violent acts against police officers in 2024, only 149 cases (+0.3 percent) were added compared to 2023. This would not have been of interest to journalists. Therefore, the BKA took the figures from 2015 as a reference and arrived at an increase of 38.5%.

The rules in criminal law, which have been tightened several times since then, were not questioned. In 2017, for example, the introduction of the separate offense of "assault" (§114 StGB) created a new category that was included in the situation report. However, the figures “calculated” on this basis do not prove an increase in violence. Violent crimes such as “resisting law enforcement officers” have actually declined in real terms or at least remained the same: 21,483 cases in 2024, 21,945 in 2015, but as many as 28,272 cases in 2008.

The Federal Criminal Police Office could have celebrated this as a 31.6% decline in violence. Instead, it continues to stir up fear and call for additional financial resources. Other positive figures are also not mentioned, such as the number of minor assaults, which fell from 8,196 (2015) to 922 (2024), a decline of almost 90 percent, as Übermedien writes. The increase in so-called "large-scale operations", i.e., the greatly increased deployment of police forces at (Palestinian) demonstrations, resulting in charges of breach of the peace (§§ 125, 125a StGB), is also not taken into account. This saw the largest increase, from 876 in 2023 to 1802 in 2024 (+105.7 percent).