Hessen Police

Officers in Frankfurt use service phones to photograph people who cannot or will not show identification; the app sends the image to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) facial recognition system and, on a match, shows the person's name, date of birth and nationality. netzpolitik.org (22 April 2026) reports that the app has been in use since December 2025, that 160 devices had the app installed, and that it queries a BKA database of about 5.36 million people. It says the police plan to make the app available to all Hessian officers after the pilot, and later to other Länder and federal agencies. The April report calls it the 'Abfrage-App'; an earlier netzpolitik.org report (16 March 2026) names it the GES-App and describes it as a joint project of the Hessian State Criminal Police Office, the BKA and an innovation unit of the Hessian police. That report, linking to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reporting, says the app had allegedly ('angeblich') already been used successfully several times, and calls such use by police unique in Germany. The two reports differ on how long Frankfurt had been testing ("a few weeks" in March; since December 2025 in April). No vendor is named, no legal basis is stated in either report, and the Frankfurt police keep the development costs secret. Status is recorded as a trial because the April report describes a pilot phase that precedes wider roll-out; no source says the pilot has ended. This is separate from the fixed-camera real-time identification in the Bahnhofsviertel, which has its own record.