Ahead of the Federal Criminal Police Office’s (BKA) 2025 crime figures, sociologist, psychologist and legal scholar Susann Prätor examines how nationality appears in police statistics and what those numbers actually mean. Non-German citizens account for more than a third of suspects, while making up about 16% of Germany’s population. For offences such as theft, burglary and violent crime, foreign nationals were roughly 34% of suspects.
Prätor cautions that raw police data can be misleading: simple nationality breakdowns risk comparing groups with very different profiles. Age and gender are central factors — young men are overrepresented among offenders everywhere, and non-German residents in Germany are on average much 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 get a fuller picture, Prätor recommends surveys of unreported crime (victimisation surveys), which ask randomly selected people about incidents that never entered official records. Those surveys reveal incidents, motives and contexts that policing data miss, and allow researchers to question both victims and perpetrators about underlying causes.
Existing research on young people points less to immutable cultural explanations than to differences in living conditions: factors such as domestic violence, lower educational opportunities, criminal peer networks and social expectations around masculinity can raise the risk of offending. These social and economic contexts vary by group and matter more than nationality alone.
Nationality details are complex. In 2024, just under 13% of suspects were Ukrainian, while Ukrainians made up 35.7% of refugees registered in Germany — a gap partly explained by the refugee population being skewed toward women and children. By contrast, nationals of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Georgia made up about 3% of suspects but under 1% of registered refugees. Syria is the second-largest source of refugees in Germany: roughly 900,000 Syrians live in Germany and about 115,000 were recorded as suspects in 2024. Many Syrian and North African asylum seekers are young men, a demographic that is associated with higher offending rates regardless of origin.
There was a 7.5% rise in violent crime involving non-German suspects in 2024, but experts warn this may reflect changes in reporting or policing rather than a genuine spike in offending. A considerable number of non-German nationals are also victims of violent crime.
Prätor’s conclusion: nationality alone does not explain crime statistics. To interpret the figures responsibly you must consider demographics, reporting biases, living conditions and the portion of crime that never reaches the police. This article was originally published in German.