Ahead of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) presenting crime figures for Germany in 2025, sociologist, psychologist, and legal scholar Susann Prätor has shared her insights on the issue of nationality and statistics. She emphasized that factors such as age and gender play a crucial role in interpreting crime data, as young males have always been disproportionately represented among suspects, regardless of ethnic background.
Prätor, a professor at the police academy in Lower Saxony, noted that non-Germans are, on average, significantly younger than Germans, and young men as a demographic group frequently stand out for their involvement in criminal activity, not only in Germany but worldwide. Additionally, she cited a 2024 study by the Criminological Institute of Lower Saxony, which found that people perceived as foreign are reported to police nearly three times as often as Germans.
The researcher hopes that studies on unreported crime will provide greater clarity on context and causes. Such studies involve randomly selecting and surveying as many people as possible about their experiences with crime, yielding additional insights into offenses that remain unreported and thus do not appear in official statistics.
Prätor explained that there are already good studies on unreported crime among young people, showing that the living conditions of immigrants differ greatly from those of Germans. Factors such as domestic violence, lower levels of education, criminal peer groups, and an emphasis on masculinity are cited as contributing elements.
A closer look at suspects' nationalities also reveals the complexity of migrant crime rates. For instance, in 2024, just under 13% of suspects were from Ukraine, a strikingly low proportion compared to the share of Ukrainian refugees living in Germany (35.7%). In contrast, for people from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Georgia, the reverse is true: about three percent of suspects come from these countries, but they account for less than one percent of refugees registered in Germany.
In 2024, there was a 7.5% increase in violent crime involving suspects with non-German nationality, but experts point out that this may be due to a rise in reporting rather than actual incidents. They also highlight that a considerable number of non-German nationals are involved in violent crimes as victims.
Source: www.dw.com