Police should in future always state the nationality of criminal suspects as a matter of principle, the interior minister of a German state has said.
Herbert Reul, interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, said the move would create a sense of transparency, but would also save the police time since their press offices are heavily involved in answering press enquiries over suspects’ nationalities.
Reul, of the centre-right CDU party, said that from now on, the nationality of a suspect should only be withheld if the public prosecutor’s office decides that it should not be published.
By publishing the nationality of offenders, the police want to “create fact-based transparency,” a spokesman for the regional interior ministry said. “In addition, the [North Rhein-Westphalia] police want to anticipate speculation and counter the accusation of wanting to conceal something.”
General-Anzeiger reports that the move is already having an effect. After a 24-year-old man stabbed a man in Bonn’s Kaiserplatz, the police announced that the suspect was from Somalia.
Earlier this year, Reul made headlines when he said: “We have a problem with non-German criminals.” Mentioning a suspect’s nationality or ethnicity has been a taboo subject in both the press and politics in Germany. Section 12 of the German Press Council’s code warns that journalists must ensure that “any reference to a suspect’s or perpetrator’s membership of ethnic, religious or other minority groups does not result in a discriminatory generalisation of individual misconduct.”
However, there are signs that attitudes are changing. During the New Year’s celebrations of 2015-16, over 1,000 women were sexually assaulted in the city of Cologne by large groups of men who were identified by officials as Arab or North African origin. The then North Rhine-Westphalia interior minister, Ralf Jäger of the left-wing SPD, insisted that the nationality of the perpetrators should not be mentioned. Numerous media outlets followed his request, however this led to frustrated voters accusating the media of censorship.
A series of statistics in recent years have shown an uptick in crime committed by foreigners against Germans. In November 2023, figures from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) revealed that 47,923 German citizens were victims of violent crimes committed by immigrants in 2022, an increase of 18% from 2021.
The figures prompted Heiko Teggatz, chairman of the Federal Police Union, to say: “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.”
