Compare weapon collections. - Hamburg's Criminal Investigation Agency holds approximately 4,400 weapons.
The Hamburg Police Department owns over 4,400 firearms and about 50,000 bullets in their weapons testing facility. This collection is crucial for solving weapon and ammunition-related cases and creating incident reports according to a police spokesperson. Police technicians use this extensive collection to determine whether a bullet found at a crime scene matches the suspect's weapon or if any tampering has occurred. Having a diverse range of weapons, with different designs, makes and years helps with these analyses.
Adding to the collection is regulated by an internal service rule in Hamburg. Some handguns, revolvers, and rifles come from closed criminal cases where police confiscated the weapons. Only when a better preserved example of the same type is available do weapons in the collection get removed. Ammunition has not been disposed of since 2020, it was indicated. This ammunition is only utilized in essential investigations.
Recent attention has been given to comparative weapon collections after news emerged in May that Saxony-Anhalt's Ministry of the Interior had wrongly accepted weapons and ammunition into their state criminal police office's collection since 2019. Furthermore, the Magdeburg Criminal Police Office had just disposed of around 50,000 rounds of ammunition before an impending audit by the state auditor's office.
The amount of comparison weapons in the collections of state criminal police offices widely varies with some having only a few hundred pieces. The largest collections are reportedly found at the state criminal police offices in Lower Saxony (9,400 objects) and Bavaria (8,000).
