Some groups of foreigners in Germany are much more likely to commit violent crimes as Germans themselves, new numbers from the German police show.
According to the Police Criminal Statistics (PKS) for 2025 – which were made public on April 20 – 273 out of 100,000 German men became suspects of a violent crime in the past year.
The number of suspects per 100,000 people is referred to by the German police. as the “incidence rate”.
For Syrian and Afghan nationals this number is eight to nine times higher, with 2,252 suspects per 100,000 Syrians and 2,545 per 100,000 Afghans recorded – according to German interior minister Alexander Dobrindt (Christian Social Union, CSU).
Irrespective of their nationality, foreigners are overrepresented in the crime statistics: Some 43 per cent of all suspects of violent offences noted by the PKS did not have German citizenship. This does not include the millions of foreigners who were naturalised in past years.
In 2024 alone, almost 300,000 foreigners received German citizenship. For 2025, a record high of 500,000 naturalisations is expected.
According to Dobrindt and Federal Criminal Police Office President Holger Münch, part of the reason for the higher criminal incidence among foreigners is that they are, on average, younger and more often male than Germans as a whole.
Even accounting for age, though, foreigners are more than twice as likely to be suspected of a crime than Germans in the same age group. For male youths under 18, the incidence rate is 13,811 for foreigners, compared to 6,118 for Germans. For young adults aged 18 to 24, the ratio is 12,297 to 5,762.
Police union chairman Manuel Ostermann told newspaper Bild yesterday: “In central areas, crime rates continue to reach intolerably high levels. The PKS figures also show that migration continues to have a massive impact on internal security.
“The trend in youth crime is particularly alarming. This calls for early prevention, clear consequences and a greater sense of social responsibility.”
Conversely, sociologist Susann Prätor cautioned that foreigners may not be more criminal per se but due to their life circumstances, telling law magazine LTO on April 20: “People of non-German origin are more likely to be affected by poverty and therefore tend to live in socially deprived neighbourhoods.
“Crime rates are higher in these areas. However, these are also the areas where the police are more active – meaning that more suspects are likely to be identified.
“These people are also more likely to experience parental violence, are subject to norms of masculinity that legitimise violence, and are less likely to attend a grammar school. In the PKS, the distortion caused by differences in reporting behaviour further disadvantages people with a migrant background,” Prätor said.
She claimed that if those factors were taken into account, there would be no differences in violent behaviour between the different groups.
