The AfD's Knife Crime Portal is Built on Bad Data

Unpacking the far-right party's pre-election attempt to pin knife crime on immigrants.

June 19, 2026

A side-view mirror kicked off a car in Hanau. A Volkswagen wrapped around a lamppost in Öhringen. A roof set ablaze in Oldenburg. These are a few of the cases included in the AfD’s new map of knife crime in Berlin.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that these cases neither involve knives nor do they take place in Berlin. In fact, 8% – roughly 1 in 12 – of the 245 cases logged on the tracker in its first month are entirely unrelated to knife attacks.

On April 1, the AfD launched the website “MesserHauptstadt”, or "knife capital". It’s a sleek, AI-powered dashboard meant to provide a “comprehensive and data-driven view of the true extent of knife violence in Berlin.” Announcing the site, AfD politician Thorsten Weiß cited antifascist writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s famous quote: "The truth is bearable for mankind."

Is it, though?

“What they are doing is fearmongering,” says Christian Walburg, a criminologist at the University of Münster. “Emotions fuel sentiment, and for this it's not necessary to produce correct data.”

There are several glaring issues with MesserHauptstadt. The first are the undeniably inaccurate cases, where the AfD’s AI-powered categoriser clearly made a mistake. The cities are either wrong, or there’s no explanation to justify why the case was included, like one where a 20-year-old threw a sugar jar at a restaurant owner in Mitte.

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