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Attack on doctor and nurse in Berlin on New Year's Eve: Acts of violence in Berlin hospitals increased by 51 percent

Photo: Alina Quast / WELT TV

Violent crimes such as assault and robbery are becoming more and more common in German hospitals.

Nationwide, the number of so-called brutality crimes in medical facilities has increased by 20 percent since 2019 to 6,894 crimes in 2022, as a SPIEGEL survey of all 16 state criminal investigation offices showed.

In Berlin, where a video made headlines on New Year's Eve showing a patient and his brothers attacking a doctor and a nurse in a clinic's outpatient clinic, figures for 2023 are already available.

Here the number of violent crimes rose by 51 percent.

Only in Bavaria did the numbers decline

In other federal states, too, the increase in brutality crimes is sometimes drastic.

Saarland recorded an increase of 67 percent, Bremen by 55 percent.

In Lower Saxony the number rose by 46 percent to 559 cases, and in Saxony-Anhalt by 31 percent to 406 cases.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous federal state, the number of violent crimes rose by 29 percent to 1,571 crimes.

In almost all 13 federal states that have been collecting figures on brutality crimes in hospitals since 2019, the trend is increasing.

With one exception: Bavaria.

The number of such crimes there fell by 11 percent.

The reason: In the comparable year 2019, there were relatively many acts of violence in medical facilities in the Free State - 1,190 cases.

A year earlier there were only 771 cases.

The numbers in Bavaria have been slowly falling again since 2019.

Most recently there were 1,059 brutality crimes.

Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony have only been reporting acts of violence in hospitals separately since 2020 and are therefore not taken into account.

Not all federal states collect the numbers uniformly, and the crime scene was not always recorded.

It is also unclear who was the victim of the crimes.

However, surveys in countries have shown that medical staff repeatedly experience violence.

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