Lower Saxony’s Interior Minister Daniela Behrens has ridiculed the initiative of her North Rhine-Westphalia counterpart to record multiple nationalities of suspects and victims in crime statistics.
CDU official Herbert Reul ordered the policy’s introduction in North Rhine-Westphalia late last month, saying that without this information, “we are groping in the dark.” It means that anyone holding a German passport alongside another will no longer appear solely as German in the state’s crime data.
But Behrens hit back this week, saying she believes “the direction of this debate to be fundamentally wrong.” The SPD official toldDer Spiegel:
A German is someone who holds German citizenship; there is, and should be, no gradation.
As if, therefore, there was any doubt, Behrens added that Lower Saxony will not be changing what she described as its “proven practice.”
Not that there isn’t pressure for the region to follow North Rhine-Westphalia’s lead. CDU MP André Bock said showing multiple nationalities in police crime statistics “is an important step towards greater transparency and honesty in the security debate.”
Perhaps, as we previously posed, other states will reconsider their positions once the results of North Rhine-Westphalia’s become clear.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
