Bundeskriminalamt (German Federal Criminal Police Office)

The BKA operates the Gesichtserkennungssystem (GES), which has been available to all German police authorities since 2008 and compares facial images against the photographs held in the INPOL police information system. netzpolitik.org (16 December 2024), citing the federal government's answer to a Bundestag minor interpellation, reports that a renewed GES based on artificial intelligence was introduced in September 2024, and gives 117,894 searches in 2023 (Landeskriminalämter 74,803, BKA 26,187, Bundespolizei 16,904) against 91,767 in 2022; INPOL held 7,293,861 images of 5,099,635 people on 8 March 2024. netzpolitik.org (2 April 2026), citing the Federal Interior Ministry's answer to a parliamentary question (linked as Bundestag Drucksache 21/4186), reports 313,500 search runs by the federal and state criminal police offices together in 2025 against 121,000 in 2024, with about 22,000 investigative leads, about 30,000 searches by the Bundespolizei, and a database of 5.4 million people with 7.6 million photographs; it notes that the figures may include double counts, for example from repeated searches on the same image. The Drucksache itself could not be read, so these figures are as netzpolitik.org reports them. No vendor is named in either report. The Hessian mobile app and the use of the system by the Bundespolizei and the Bavarian LKA have their own records.