Berlin, July 30th, 2026 (The Berlin Spectator) – On July 22nd, 2026, the Berlin Police Department sent out three press statements about attacks with knives that took place in the city. In one of them, the authority reported about an argument between “two groups” in the Gesundbrunnen neighborhood the night before. One of those groups consisted of three, the other of five persons. At Demminer Strasse, they got into an argument which escalated.
During the quarrel, a member of the smaller group stabbed two members of the bigger one with a knife. Both victims needed to be treated at a hospital. A detective squad is investigating this case. Was anyone surprised people were stabbed in Berlin? No. Because it happens all the time.
During the same night, police officers were called to an accommodation for homeless people in Berlin’s Schöneberg district. According to the second police statement, there was an argument between a 33-year-old woman and her former partner, a 44-year-old man. At this location at Wexstrasse, the man supposedly attacked both his ex and another man with a knife. Then he poured gasoline over the woman and set her alight. The female victim sustained stabbing wounds and burns. She was rushed to a hospital, while the culprit fled.
Victim Dies at Hospital
The third police statement the authority sent out on July 22nd said that the homicide division at the Berlin Police Department had taken over the investigation into yet another case of this kind: A 43-year-old man was accused of “injuring his 65-year-old mother lethally” with a knife. The suspect was seen holding the knife on the balcony of their apartment at Mariendorfer Damm. The police raided the place and arrested him. Shortly after, the victim was declared dead at the hospital she was taken to.
All of this happened within a day. None of these cases is an exception. The very next day, the police sent out yet another report about a knife attack. A 31-year-old stabbed a 33-year-old in Lankwitz. Police statements of this kind have been coming in on an almost daily basis for years. This is not Chicago in the 1970s, but Berlin in the 2020s.
“Combating knife-related crime in the urban area is a top priority for the Berlin Police Department”, the authority just told The Berlin Spectator. Four years earlier, the officer Karsten Bonack had told this publication he was worried about the rising number of stabbings. Something needed to be done, he stated back then. Bonack isn’t just any police officer with an opinion, but a national hero, because he defended the Reichstag building against an attempted attack carried out by a mob of right-wing extremists on August 29th, 2020, single-handedly, before his colleagues rushed to help him.
Substantial Increase in Stabbings
Today, the police say they are pursuing a strategy designed to decrease the number of stabbings in Berlin. They are stressing there had been a decline in the first half of 2026. Since the numbers are so terrifying, a decrease is exactly what this city needs. But the coin has a flip-side: Since 2016, the number of stabbings in Berlin has actually increased substantially.
In 2016, a total of 2,625 knife attacks were reported in Berlin. Nine years later, in 2025, that number had grown to 3,599, according to the chapter about “knife attack phenomena” in the latest crime report for the German capital. What this means is that there were almost ten stabbings every single day last year. This leads to the following question: How safe is Berlin? The Islamist attack on the CSD Berlin this past weekend, during which a woman was killed and 31 people injured, seven of them severely, does not make this place feel any safer. A knife-like object was reportedly involved, apart from the vehicle the culprit drove into CSD participants in Tiergarten park.
Obviously, the Berlin Police Department is taking the stabbings problem seriously. The establishment of weapon and knife prohibition zones in specific areas, namely
crime hotspots and across the entire public transport network, is one of three main strategies the police are pursuing.
Prevention and Public Outreach
The next one is prevention and public outreach: “These initiatives are tailored to specific target audiences, subject to ongoing evaluation and development, and designed to provide information and raise awareness regarding the issue”, the PD told The Berlin Spectator today.
Individual restrictions are the third strategy put in place by Berlin’s police chief Barbara Slowik. “In addition to the general bans on weapons and knives in specific areas and on
public transport, the Berlin Police take decisive action against suspects who have
repeatedly committed serious or highly attention-grabbing crimes involving the use of a knife”, her authority says. “A range of measures primarily aimed at averting danger is available for this purpose and is applied on a case-by-case basis.”
Berlin’s police officers issue formal warnings to individuals that are suspicious in this regard. They forbid them to carry dangerous objects, put in place individual weapons possession bans and they are having driver licensing revoked “due to unsuitability based on character”, according to police spokesman Jörn Iffländer.
The Berlin Police Department has some 18,000 officers, but, obviously, preventing stabbings is only one of many tasks they have. At least it is a high priority one. The police fight other kinds of crime committed in this big city, they deal with Arab family clans, the drug problem, with traffic offenders and 6,500 protests per year some of which are violent. In addition, they protect the government as well as the parliament. Whether the latest knife ban in Berlin’s public transport will help bring the number of stabbings down, remains to be seen.
