They told the tabloid Tagesspiegel that officers had registered in 2018, 2 795 sexual offenses and attacks in which a knife was wielded. “This represents an increase of 58 actions (plus 2.1 percent) and represents the highest value since the beginning of the corresponding evaluation,” said a police spokesman.
Since 2008, the police database system for certain offenses have been in place. The police crime statistics for 2018 will be presented in detail in the police crime statistics. This will probably be published at the end of the first half of the year.
Only last weekend, a series of knife attacks in Berlin made headlines. Within eleven hours, the police registered five cases. According to the report, the number of crimes in which such weapons were used, rose last year.
The police in North Rhine-Westphalia have meanwhile warned against so-called “wedding blockades”. In recent weeks, there have been several such incidents by Turkish or Arab wedding companies, involving traffic insidents of highways, police spokesman Kim Freigang told the news agency dpa.
Recently, several sports cars had blocked Autoroute 3 near Düsseldorf to take wedding photos on the road. “This is absolutely life-threatening and meaningless,” said the spokesman.
The perpetrators, all immigrants, could not rely on a defense of their “cultural customs” in this case it seems. Rather, it is now about a very questionable attitude to rules.
The police said in the Düsseldorf case, the blockade resulted in a traffic jam, taking road users hostage. “These were even people who held up prohibition signs for landscaping and speed controls as rip-offs,” Freigang noted.
At the end of March, the police in Essen stopped a Lebanese wedding party that had been street racing in the city. Similar cases have recently occurred in other federal states.