Study: Reporting bias, not behavior, explains crime statistics gap between Germans and foreigners

Every autumn, when Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office releases its annual crime statistics, a particular audience waits with unusual intensity. The Alternative for Germany party—a political force with significant far-right elements—scours the data for one thing: crimes involving refugees, migrants, and foreign nationals. Media scholars have documented what they find: roughly 95 percent of the party's press releases about crime focus on non-German suspects, while crimes committed by German citizens receive almost no mention.

The resulting narrative is familiar and stark: foreigners are inherently more violent, more prone to criminality, a threat to public safety. But a new research project led by Susann Prätor, a sociologist and criminologist at the Lower Saxony Police Academy, working alongside colleagues from the University of Zurich and the Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute, reveals something more complicated hiding inside those statistics. The numbers that appear to show foreigners committing crimes at dramatically higher rates actually reflect something else entirely: a systematic difference in how crimes get reported to police in the first place.

Prätor's team examined not just officially recorded crime—the cases that make it into police statistics—but also unreported offenses, identified through representative population surveys. The gap between these two measures tells the story. According to official police records, non-German nationals commit crimes more frequently than German citizens. But when researchers looked at crimes that never reached police, the picture shifted. Non-German nationals are reported to authorities twice as often as German nationals who commit similar offenses. German offenders, in other words, are far more likely to escape the statistical record entirely.

When Prätor adjusted the official crime statistics to account for this reporting bias, the headline number changed dramatically. Foreigners appeared not 2.6 times more likely to commit crimes than Germans, but 1.7 times more likely—a substantial difference, but one that begins to look less like an inherent characteristic and more like a measurable gap shaped by other factors. This adjusted figure aligns closely with separate studies on unreported juvenile violence, which found foreign youths commit violent crimes about 1.6 times as often as German youths.

Demographics explain much of what remains. The foreign-born population in Germany skews younger and more male than the overall population, and young men everywhere commit crimes at higher rates than other groups. Age and gender, not nationality or culture, emerge as the primary drivers. Prétor emphasized this point with precision: factors like youth, maleness, poor education, and prior exposure to violence increase the likelihood of criminal behavior across all populations. "We do not see culture as a factor, contrary to the prejudice that masculinity and violence play a greater role in other cultures," she said.

Family experience matters more than cultural background. Prétor pointed to survey data showing that 5 percent of German youths view violence positively, compared to 10 percent of youths without German citizenship. But the source of that difference lies in childhood experience, not inherent values. "If I experience violence in my own home, I will have a different relationship to violence than if I hadn't experienced it," Prétor explained. The good news, she noted, is that Germany has been moving in the right direction for decades. Parental violence in child-rearing has declined sharply since the 1960s, and youth violence overall is far less common than it was in the 1990s or early 2000s.

The actual scale of serious violent crime provides perspective. Of every 100 German citizens, 0.2 percent commit serious violent crimes like aggravated assault, manslaughter, or murder. Among non-German nationals, the figure is 0.6 percent. But Prétor's larger point cuts through the noise: more than 99 percent of people living in Germany—German and non-German alike—commit no serious violent crimes at all. The overwhelming majority integrate exceptionally well.

Prétor, who trains prospective police officers, is pushing policymakers toward a different conversation. Rather than fixating on crime statistics that reflect reporting patterns as much as actual behavior, she argues, Germany should invest in prevention. Early intervention in preschool and school, building social skills, responding quickly to violence when it occurs, and creating infrastructure and recreational opportunities in underserved regions—these are where resources should flow. Youth violence, regardless of background, correlates strongly with lack of meaningful daily structure. The debate on immigration, she contends, has become unnecessarily narrow and negative, shaped by an overemphasis on police data that obscures the reality of successful integration happening across the country.