In reaction to rising knife violence in Germany, Bonn’s police chief Frank Hoever has said: “People of other cultures have a different relationship to knives.”
That was despite the fact that, statistically speaking, the number of violent knife crimes in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, has dropped in the past year.
Hoever told Die Welt on April 13 that was only possible due to the major efforts of the local police to tackle the problem.
In 2023, stabbings rose by 45 per cent in the region of North Rhine-Westphalia, from 4,292 in 2022 to 6,221 such attacks in 2023.
The number of victims increased from 5,541 to 8,036.
Some 34 per cent of the suspects were non-Germans, despite such individuals only making up 15 per cent of the population.
In Bonn, the situation was similar, the police chief said.
“The perpetrators are young and male, and the proportion of non-German suspects is 40 per cent.”
About 16 per cent of the population of Bonn is non-German.
In addition, among the remaining 60 per cent of perpetrators, there was also a proportion with dual nationality, which was not listed separately in the statistics.
“That’s why I’m sticking to what I’ve said before: people from other cultures have a different relationship with knives,” Hoever said.
According to him, young men from other cultures have fallen prey to what he termed “exaggerated masculinity” and “power posturing.”
“Young men want to show off in front of the group and act tough. When insults are exchanged, things can quickly spiral out of control,” he said.
Bonn’s police chief stated he wanted to make it clear to young men what injuries could occur and how life-threatening they can be.
Speaking about the same issue on the German public TV channel ZDF, Dirk Baier, a criminologist from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, said he believed the increase in knife crime was probably caused by social inequality.
Deporting foreign offenders was, according to him, “not helpful.”
Local politicians and Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser called for more regulations targeting the misuse of weapons.
The federal head of the police union (GdP), Jochen Kopelke, suggested an amnesty for people who possess knives, rewarding those who handed them in, for example, he said, a Netflix subscription in exchange for a dangerous or illegal knife being handed in.