Assessing Arsenal of Weapons - The State Office of Criminal Investigation in the north retains over 4000 firearms.
The Schleswig-Holstein Police Department's Criminal Investigation Office (LKA) possesses over 4,000 firearms and hundreds of kilograms of ammunition for various work-related activities, such as training and comparing weapons and ammunition. The LKA justified this by stating that it facilitates criminal police operations, including determining whether a bullet discovered at a crime scene matches the suspect's weapon or examining whether there have been any tampering.
The LKA emphasized that without this extensive weapons collection, a criminal technical weapons examination office would not be feasible, thus urging the collection to contain as many weapon models and their modifications as possible in a functioning state. However, the LKA in the north of Germany is still far from achieving this objective. The acceptance of weapons and ammunition into the LKA's collection in the north is regulated through the Penitentiary Act.
Each year, over 3,500 firearms - including air guns, airsoft guns, and shock guns - are destroyed by the LKA, as well as eight tons of ammunition throughout the last five years. The search for functional specimens of individual weapon models has been a priority for the LKA.
Recently, comparison weapons collections have received considerable attention, in part due to the Interior Ministry of Saxony-Anhalt's announcement in May, revealing that there had been errors in the acceptance of weapons or ammunition into the state criminal investigation office's collection since 2019. Additionally, it was disclosed that the LKA in Magdeburg had destroyed large amounts of ammunition before an audit by the State Audit Office.
The number of comparison weapons in each state's collections varies greatly, with some state criminal investigation offices having only a few hundred weapons while others have significantly more. The largest collections are reportedly in Lower Saxony (9,400 objects) and Bavaria (8,000).
