German police officers fired at least 19,858 shots from their service weapons last year. This emerges from answers to WELT inquiries to the interior ministries of the federal states and to the federal police. The actual number is likely to be slightly higher. On the one hand, the Hessian Ministry of the Interior only shows a rounding instead of the exact data. On the other hand, the surveys are not consistently standardized and relate either to the number of shots or to the number of times firearms were used – in some cases, however, more than one shot was fired.
However, the data clearly shows: According to the information, the operations were hardly aimed at people. A total of eight dead and 31 injured by police weapons were reported across Germany for 2021. In addition, a few dozen warning shots were fired nationwide.
One person each died in Baden-Württemberg, Hamburg and Lower Saxony, two people were shot in Hesse and three in North Rhine-Westphalia. The most populous federal state also had the highest number of injuries, at nine.
The “Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland” reports that six of the eight people shot were armed with a knife, and that around half of the dead had evidence of mental illness.
Animals or objects were almost always the target in firearm operations. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, for example, 1655 out of 1664 were aimed at sick, injured or dangerous animals, in Lower Saxony 2522 out of 2545, in Rhineland-Palatinate 1633 out of 1640. There were also shots at objects, such as doors, which were opened by a special task force using force of arms.
Federal police officers shot 127 times across Germany last year, three of them at people. Nobody was injured or killed. According to the federal police, there were 293,792 deployments without the use of firearms.
The police were recently criticized after officials in Germany had shot several people in the past few months. In particular, the death of a 16-year-old Senegalese refugee in Dortmund led to debates. The youth was hit by five bullets from a submachine gun and died shortly afterwards in hospital. He is said to have attacked officers armed with a knife who had been called because the 16-year-old could have harmed himself. In Dortmund there were demonstrations against police violence.
A few days earlier, police officers in Cologne had shot a man during an eviction, in Frankfurt am Main a man died during an operation in a hotel.
The interior ministries and police authorities do not always establish whether officials may have used their service weapons in an unlawful manner. Some federal states report isolated cases, most of which date back years. According to official information, there has been no such case in Baden-Württemberg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Thuringia and Saarland since 2010. Other interior ministries do not have the data and refer to the judiciary.
Berlin is striking in this statistic. The capital has registered eleven cases of incorrect or disproportionate use of firearms by the police since 2010. In Saxony, which ranks second, almost half have six illegal firearms use during this period. The ministries emphasize that there is a strict legal framework for the use of weapons and that cases are always independently investigated.
An international comparison of the data is only possible to a limited extent because the survey is not standardized. However, there is a clear difference to the USA, where, according to an evaluation by the Washington Post, police officers shot 1065 people last year alone – in contrast to the eight dead in Germany. The data is not directly comparable, around four times as many people live in the USA, and there are also an extremely large number of weapons in circulation there due to lax laws.
In the UK, on the other hand, according to the organization Inquest, between one and three people have usually been shot dead by police in the past decade. In the UK, a fairly large proportion of the police force go on duty without carrying a firearm.
The statistics of the individual federal states in the overview:
Baden-Württemberg: 1376 cases of firearm use, 4 injured, one deadBayern: 4984 shots, six injured, no dead
Berlin: 161 cases of firearm use, three injured, no deaths
Brandenburg: 1238 cases of firearm use, one injured, no deaths
Bremen: 12 shots, no injuries or deaths
Hamburg: 49 cases of firearm use, no injuries, one dead
Hesse: Around 1,300 cases of firearm use, three injured, two dead
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania: 1664 cases of firearm use, no injuries or deaths
Lower Saxony: 2545 cases of firearm use, no injuries, one dead
North Rhine-Westphalia: 1958 cases of firearm use, nine injured, three dead
Rhineland-Palatinate: 1640 cases of firearm use, no injuries or deaths
Saarland: 230 cases of firearm use, one injured, no deaths
Saxony: 991 cases of firearm use, two injured, no deaths
Saxony-Anhalt: 522 cases of firearm use, one injured, no deaths
Schleswig-Holstein: 746 shots, one injured, no dead
Thuringia: 315 cases of firearm use, no injuries or deaths
Federal police: 127 firearm cases, no injuries or deaths
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