New figures from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) that detail the demographic makeup of serious violent crime suspects in 2022 have been called “frightening” by the chief of the Federal Police Union, who urged both state and federal authorities to take swift action to put an end to the problem.
The BKA’s 2022 “Federal situation report on crime in the context of immigration” revealed that 47,923 German citizens fell victim to violent crimes carried out by immigrants—defined by the office as foreigners who came to the country as refugees or asylum seekers—last year, up 18% from 2021, BILD reports.
Only “serious crimes” like homicide, attempted homicide, manslaughter, rape, assault, and robbery that were solved by police were considered in this particular BKA report.
Responding to the report’s findings, Heiko Teggatz, chairman of the Federal Police Union, said:
What many have always suspected is now proven. There’s nothing left to sugarcoat here. The federal and state governments must now act consistently and exhaust all possibilities to deport such criminals.
The nationalities of these criminals must not protect against deportation. Anyone who commits serious crimes in Germany has forfeited their right to protection and should only be released when they set foot on the soil of their home country.
Conversely, the report showed that a total of 12,061 immigrants were violently victimized by a suspect with German citizenship, a cohort that includes those with dual nationalities and people with migrant backgrounds.
Therefore, statistically speaking, German citizens, including those with a second passport, were attacked by immigrants four times as often as the other way around.
In the most serious category, which includes crimes like murder, attempted murder, and manslaughter, 258 Germans, 38 of whom died, were victimized by immigrants. Conversely, 89 immigrants fell victim to crimes in this category where at least one German was the suspect. Five of those lost their lives.
Immigrants—which includes rejected and not yet rejected asylum seekers according to the BKA’s classification system—from Maghreb countries (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) were especially overrepresented. Despite comprising just 0.6% of those classified by the BKA as immigrants, they made up 8.5% of all asylum seekers suspected of having committed a serious, violent offense.
Ukrainians, meanwhile, were the immigrant cohort least likely to have committed a violent crime. Per the figures cited in the BKA’s report, Ukrainians comprised 35.5% of all immigrants, but only 6.5% were suspected of having committed a serious crime. Roughly a million Ukrainian refugees lived in Germany in 2022.
Of the some 1.92 million suspects identified by police last year, 612,000 (31.9%) were non-German passport holders, despite making up only 16% of the population, while 143,000 (7.4%) were immigrants according to the BKA’s classification.
Also responding to the revelations from BKA’s report, North Rhine Westphalia’s Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) said :
Foreign crime should not be a taboo topic. The figures from the Federal Criminal Police Office are a serious initial suspicion: if too many people come to our country and we do not manage to integrate them properly, crime will increase.
