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After the refugee influx in 2015, AfD politicians warned of crime, violence and civil war. Five years later, overall crime has dropped; but there are problematic developments.
By Patrick Gensing and Andrej Reisin, ARD Fact Seeker
After the influx of refugees in 2015, there was a debate about crime. Then-AfD president Frauke Petry said that the “daily crime of alleged asylum seekers on the street” was “intolerable.” The more young, uneducated and often aggressive immigrants from North Africa, the more the situation will escalate. “We don’t want a civil war in Germany.” The AfD focused on crime and refugees, as one analysis showed.
Individual acts of violence attracted much public attention, especially sex crimes in Kandel and Freiburg. There was also talk of a supposed “knife epidemic”. Even the president of the United States, Donald Trump, participated in the discussions.
But how has crime developed in the last five years? As a result of the sharp increase in immigration, the crime rate for this group also increased. The number of crimes recorded in Police Crime Statistics (PKS) increased markedly. However, if you subtract violations of immigration law that can only be committed by non-Germans, there is hardly any increase: in 2014 the number of registered crimes increased by 1.3 percent, then stagnated for a year and has fallen continuously since 2016.
Long term trend
Thus, a trend that has been going on for many years continues: the PKS recorded around 5.4 million crimes in the 2019 reporting year; in 2005 it was about a million more. Despite changes in the record that make long-term comparability difficult, the number of recorded crimes has decreased by around 20 percent in the last 30 years. The reasons for this are, among other things, demographic: Germany has had an aging and declining population for a long time, leading to lower crime overall.
For the same demographic reasons, the immigrant group per se commits a disproportionately high number of crimes: they are significantly younger and more masculine than the average German resident population. Men commit more crimes than women in all countries, and young people more than older people. These are constant criminological factors. Young men between the ages of 14 and 30 are responsible for the vast majority of crime, especially violent crime. Their participation in the immigrant group is approximately three times higher than in the rest of the population.
In addition, there are precarious living conditions, further increasing susceptibility to crime: massive overcrowded housing, few opportunities to seek legal employment, and in many cases, insecure prospects to stay. Many immigrants have various risk factors for crime. Statistics mean that the BKA has changed its definition of “immigrant” several times. For example, asylum seekers with a complete procedure were not initially registered, but are now included.
Homicides
These factors have the greatest impact on acts of violence: the number of attempted and consummated crimes against life, i.e. murder, homicide, bodily injury resulting in death, etc., increased from 2,721 to 2,971 from 2015 to 2017. At the same time, the number of participating crimes increased from Immigrants from 233 to 447. In mathematical terms, almost all of the increase is due to suspected immigrants. Its share of these homicides was 15 percent in 2017, a multiple of its share of a good two percent in the total resident population.
The 2018 statistics criticized the fact that the BKA counted the victims of the terrorist attack on Breitscheidplatz in Berlin in December 2016, which were only recorded in the statistics in 2018, as “completed homicides”, along with the seven German deaths of the terrorist. Anise. Amri also injured 75. At the time, the BKA announced that this was not possible “due to the technical recording requirements of the PKS.” If both people are killed and injured in one act, the entire course of events, including all victims, is counted as a “completed homicide. A change to record the degree of injury to the victims will take place in 2020.”
More recently, the number of crimes and the number of suspected immigrants has fallen again: to 2,751 crimes in 2019, in which immigrants were involved in 357 cases. At 13 percent, their share remains disproportionately high.
Assault and other violent crimes
A similar picture emerges for the so-called crude crimes (assault, robbery, deprivation of liberty, kidnapping, coercion and threats, etc.): from 2015 to 2016 there was a sharp increase from 664,065 to 708,682 crimes, with the cases of immigrants of 35,723 they nearly doubled to 69,035. According to the PKS, the proportion of crimes committed by at least one suspected immigrant increased from 5.4 percent to 10.7 percent between 2015 and 2018. Last year, it fell slightly again to 10.1 percent for the first time. .
Sexual offenses
There are also clear increases in the number of crimes against sexual self-determination (sexual assault, rape and sexual abuse of children) related to immigration. However, with one important caveat: at the end of 2016, the crimes were modified and new ones were introduced. For this reason, as of the PKS 2017, there was a sharp increase in certain crimes that were not previously registered as sexual crimes, but as insults, for example. Therefore, the figures are only very limited comparable.
However, the proportion of crime related to immigrants doubled from 1,683 to 3404 in 2015 to 2016. The total number only increased from 36,532 to 37,442 during this period, meaning that this increase could be entirely arithmetically attributable to the group of suspected immigrants. .
As with other violent crimes, the number of crimes committed by immigrants has decreased slightly recently. However, immigrants continue to play a disproportionately important role: according to the PKS, they were jointly responsible for 5,802 or 10.1 percent of all crimes in 2019, including 14.5 percent of all reported rapes. Furthermore, the consequences of these acts are especially serious for those affected and the population’s sense of security.
terrorism
Starting in 2015, there was also great concern that IS terrorists would arrive in Germany as refugees. In fact, Anis Amri, who entered Germany as a refugee in 2015, carried out the worst Islamist attack to date in Germany in December 2016. In July 2016, a Syrian refugee blew himself up in Ansbach, injuring 15 others. .
In mid-August, an Iraqi man carried out an attack on the Berlin city highway, allegedly motivated by Islam. The suspect was temporarily transferred to a psychiatric ward. He injured a total of six people, three of them seriously.
The problem of multiple offenders
Both Amri and the attacker on the city highway had already been exposed to crime. These multiple perpetrators play a very important role in crime in the context of immigration. According to the police, about a third of the immigrants involved in the crime are multiple suspects. According to the PKS, multiple suspects play a role in 71 percent of all crimes committed by immigrants. That is much more than in the rest of the PKS, where the proportion is less than 27 percent.
Few intensive criminals are responsible for a large part of the disproportionate proportion of crimes with suspected immigrants. It is notable that suspects from countries with little prospect of staying play the leading role here. The proportion of multiple suspects from Libya, the Maghreb countries, Georgia, Guinea and the Gambia exceeds 40 percent, while it is only slightly above average for refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq who are most likely to obtain asylum. A 2018 study also found prospects to be a deal breaker.
Without criminological all clear
Despite a slight decrease, the criminologist Dominic Kudlacek is concerned about the situation: “No one is more criminal than others because of their passport, but the group of immigrants as a whole continues to have a significant level of crime.” The current declines are “weakening a trend”, but crime remains “at a high level, especially in the area of violent crime with the most serious consequences for victims.”
Kudlacek therefore calls for significantly more prevention: “We know from research that experiences of violence, especially in childhood and adolescence, greatly increase the likelihood of engaging in violence. This means that we need ongoing anti-violence education and an early intervention if it is too much Violence occurs in families, in schools or in collective accommodation “. Constant prosecution is part of this, too, Kudlacek said. In particular, the population must be protected against multiple offenders, whose acts are not due to a single affect, before they commit new crimes.
