Ahead of the Federal Criminal Police Office’s (BKA) 2025 crime figures, sociologist, psychologist and legal scholar Susann Prätor reflects on nationality and statistics. More than a third of suspects are not German citizens, though non-citizens make up about 16% of Germany’s population and accounted for roughly 34% of suspects across theft, burglary and violent crime.
Prätor warns that police crime statistics can be misleading — “like comparing apples to oranges.” Age and gender matter: young men are disproportionately represented among suspects worldwide, and non-Germans in Germany are, on average, significantly younger than Germans. Studies also show people perceived as foreign are more likely to be reported to police; a 2024 study by the Criminological Institute of Lower Saxony found non-Germans were reported nearly three times as often as Germans.
To better understand context and causes, Prätor advocates surveys of unreported crime, where randomly selected people are asked about their experiences. This approach captures incidents that never reach official statistics and allows questioning of victims and perpetrators about underlying factors. Existing studies on young people point to differences in living conditions between immigrants and Germans — factors cited include domestic violence, lower education levels, criminal peer groups and cultural expectations around masculinity.
Nationality breakdowns underline the complexity. In 2024, just under 13% of suspects were from Ukraine, while Ukrainian refugees made up 35.7% of refugees registered in Germany — a disparity partly explained by the fact that most Ukrainian refugees are women and children. By contrast, nationals from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Georgia made up about 3% of suspects but less than 1% of registered refugees.
Syria is the second largest source of refugees in Germany: around 900,000 Syrians live in Germany and roughly 115,000 were identified as suspects in 2024. Many Syrian asylum seekers are young and male — a demographic linked to higher offending rates regardless of country of origin. Similarly, 74–82% of asylum seekers from North African countries are men, and men’s share of total crime is consistently much higher than women’s.
There was a 7.5% increase in violent crime involving suspects with non-German nationality in 2024. Experts caution this may reflect increased reporting rather than a rise in incidents. They also note that a considerable number of non-German nationals are victims of violent crime.
Prätor’s view: nationality alone is an insufficient explanation for crime statistics. Demographics, reporting biases, living conditions and unreported incidents must be considered to interpret the numbers accurately.
This article was originally published in German.