German police is trained to deescalate if possible and for riot or protest control, use of lethal weaponry is rarely authorized if riot control is necessary at all. Water cannons can still hurt people but they're massively less lethal than any type of bean bag rounds or rubber bullets.

Notably, the German police is also trained for much longer, three to four years at minimum. They're trained with guns to aim for parts of the body that make it less likely to kill a target instantly or quickly and instead incapacitates them (of course, with a gun you can never know but you can alter the odds) and to only use guns as the very last resort of stopping someone. Every bullet a german police officer fires in the line of duty is accounted for (54 in 2018) and every person killed is investigated by police officers from a different precinct (11 killed in 2018). From what I've experienced and seen, guns seem to be treated as the first weapon of choice for the police officer in the US, which is the wrong mentality.