Knife Panic

Overview: Right-wing and conservative actors strategically deploy the idea of "knife crime" to criminalize racialized communities and justify widespread policing and punishment. Media and political narratives draw on this idea to link migration to rising violent crime, despite a lack of evidence, fueling a moral panic to legitimize tough approaches to crime as well as migration. Law enforcement reinforces this narrative by defining knife crime as a broad category, one that aligns more with political rhetoric than a specific offense. Their application of this label is also inconsistent, creating misleading data of crime trends that fuel racial profiling and justify aggressive policing. In court, the reality of criminal cases involving knives provides a sharp contrast to media portrayals, which often exaggerate their severity to fit racist narratives. Criminal courts disproportionately sentence people for knife possession, failing to take into account people’s realities, including that those experiencing poverty or houselessness may carry a knife for legitimate reasons. Meanwhile, racialized victims of violence cannot expect justice from the courts. They are likely to be suspected of wrongdoing and blamed, rather than receiving meaningful support from the criminal system. In these ways, the punishment system plays a key role in manufacturing a "knife crime" panic.

Over the last years, German media and politicians have increasingly advanced narratives connecting migrants and rising violent crime. One narrative in particular, that of migrants being responsible for a wave of knife crime, has recently gained traction, partly in response to the tragic events in Solingen (2024) and Aschaffenburg (2025). These individual acts of violence have fueled a moral panic around knife crime, weaponized to justify increasingly stricter migration policy for immigrants at-large. But “knife crime” is not a well-defined category, and contrary to what reporting on such cases suggests, violent crime in Germany remains low. Indeed, a closer look at criminal court cases involving knives reveals cases far away from the media image of violent attackers.

As advanced by its propagators, the knife crime narrative suggests that there is a new and increasingly violent form of crime that is driven by an increase in migration. Knives have become a symbol of so-called “migrant crime”, not least through a decade-long effort by right-wing actors to establish the link between migrants and violent knife attacks.¹ By depicting migrants as violent criminals and underscoring an alleged cultural difference, these narratives are designed to stoke racist public outrage. The aim is to pit “law-abiding German citizens” against an imagined alien criminal class² and planting the idea that German citizens need to be protected from this dangerous group. While incidents of violence involving knives do occur, their political weaponization —often against the wishes of victims‘ families³—serves to justify expanded control over racialized groups. Stuart Hall and others argue that manufacturing moral panics around “crime waves” channels societal anxieties about economic, social, and moral decline and helps the state reassert control in times of crisis.⁴

The knife crime narrative is used to justify ever tougher policies that impact migrants and racialized people more broadly, and is often advanced for electoral gain. On a policy level, responses to moral panics around knife attacks illustrate the conflation of migration and violent crime and how punitive measures against migrants are framed as crime prevention. The so-called security package (Sicherheitspaket), passed in response to the August 2024 attack in Solingen includes not only an expansion of police powers in majority-migrant neighborhoods but also restrictions on public benefits for asylum seekers. The package also includes weapon prohibition zones (Waffenverbotszonen), areas where possession of a knife is banned and punished with a hefty fine. These zones are first being implemented in areas where racist policing is already the norm. Cities are designating areas in migrantized neighborhoods as Waffenverbotszonen, often overlapping with so-called crime hotspots (kriminalitätsbelastete Orte) where police have the authority to conduct searches without concrete suspicion. Weapon prohibition zones provide cover for even more racial profiling in these communities. Amid populist outrage over the Aschaffenburg knife attack, across the spectrum politicians called for increased migration detention, deportations, swift incarceration, and heightened surveillance of migrants, mainstreaming carceral measures against migrants in the name of public safety.

Over the last years, law enforcement has been working to establish “knife crime” as a separate category of analysis, though what falls into this category is vaguely defined. For one, the term does not line up with how offenses are defined under the law. Knife crime may include a range of offenses involving a weapon, from assault to robbery to mere threats.⁵ Though knife attacks have been tracked in the police’s crime statistics as a separate category since 2020, jurisdictions have differed in what offenses were logged this way, so that data is unclear and cannot say much about any increase in knife-related offenses.⁶ Having identified a “trend” (Phänomenbereich) like “knife crime”, states typically publish reports (Lageberichte) on the development of crime trends which replicate the problems with police-recorded crime statistics and reinforce the idea that “knife crime” requires special attention.⁷

This way, police-identified trends like “clan crime” and “knife attacks” feed law enforcement agencies’ justifications for focusing surveillance and stop-and-search efforts on racialized communities, generating higher arrest rates, which in turn feeds the racist idea that certain groups are more prone to criminality.⁸ Media reporting on “crime trends” treats police data as a neutral source, rarely contextualizing that the disproportionate policing of racialized groups results in a disproportionate representation of racialized people in the system. Instead, reporting on “crime trends” amplifies general suspicion against migrantized communities. This cyclical logic—where racist policing creates the very statistics that justify further racist policing—is central to migrant crime discourses.

The reality of crimes involving knives looks very different from the sensationalized images in the press. For starters, overall crime and many offenses in violent crime are down in Germany over the long term.⁹ Contrary to fearmongering narratives, Germany ranks among the lowest numbers of homicide caused by knives in the European region.¹⁰ Secondly, as scholars have also noted in the context of the yearly reporting hype around police crime data, public perceptions of what an offense means is not always in line with the reality of the variety of incidents that get counted as a particular offense.¹¹ For example, in a large portion of the charges counted under this phenomenon no physical harm is caused.¹² Yet in public perception of the issue, “knife attacks” are equated with murder attempts or even deadly terror attacks, often because this is the context in which media reporting tends to cover the issue, particularly when the suspect is racialized.¹³

The fear and resulting call for securitization that this narrative creates do not reflect the reality of harm caused by violent behavior and tough-on-crime policies. While the white majority is led to believe that they should be concerned about becoming victims of a knife attack, in reality it is racialized people who are over-represented among the victims.¹⁴ These victims however, cannot expect safety or support from an institution that systematically criminalizes them.¹⁵ This is especially true when victims are themselves at risk of being charged with a crime, which is often the case when people are at risk of deportation, are unhoused or use drugs. Yet debates on “rising crime” often invoke a subjective sense of safety (Sicherheitsgefühl) that centers on white Germans’ perception – while disregarding the violence criminalized groups face daily.¹⁶

In court, we observe how Germany’s focus on knife crime both escalates the sentencing of racialized defendants and contributes to the criminalization of migrantized victims. As a project that documents systemic racism in the everyday work of the punishment system, we initially documented this process in “mass offenses” such as cases that make up a large portion of criminal proceedings, such as cases of theft or drug cases; although we have also observed trials for more serious offenses. In some cases, racial profiling leads to additional knife possession charges for people who are initially stopped for minor offenses.¹⁷ Even when unrelated to the main charge, the mere possession of a knife results in significantly harsher sentences and routinely prompts a judicial reprimand on the supposed immorality and recklessness of carrying a weapon.¹⁸

Alongside legal arguments for imposing harsher sentences in cases involving weapons, judges justify their decisions by invoking racist stereotypes that portray migrants as inherently dangerous. For example, judges connect people in possession of a knife with being part of “the wrong crowd”, jumping to conclusions about the level of defendants’ engagement in organized crime.¹⁹ The real and often pragmatic reasons why people living in precarious environments sometimes carry knives are not contextualized. Knives are not just weapons but practical tools, often found among the belongings of people without permanent housing alongside other daily necessities.

As we observed, racialized victims of offenses involving a knife are also held responsible for being in the “wrong place” or accused of being involved with a “criminal milieu”, accusations which reveal the limitations of the court doing justice for racialized victims.²⁰ If victims are unable to participate in incriminating the defendant, they are deemed “non-compliant”. If they fail to appear in court, they face fines and police-enforced summons to testify. Their value in the judicial process is reduced to their usefulness in securing a conviction, while their needs—such as access to counseling, healthcare, compensation, or reconciliation—are systematically disregarded and structurally excluded from the procedure. Ultimately, this shows that the panic around “knife crime” has very little to do with creating safety for all or addressing violence. This manufactured panic is a political weapon, wielded to justify authoritarian policies targeting racialized and poor communities.