Last weekend, an asylum seeker from Uzbekistan drove a truck into a department store in the Swedish capital of Stockholm, killing several people and injuring many others. A week ago in Bonn, the former capital of Western Germany, an asylum seeker from Ghana raped a 26-year-old woman who was camping with her boyfriend. The incidents, along with the mass sexual assaults in Cologne in December 2015, have raised suspicions among people that the rising number of refugees has resulted in an increase in the incidences of crime in Germany. But how true is this notion? Crimes by refugees increasing In its latest report on crime and migration, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) defines an immigrant ("Zuwanderer") as a person who has a status as: an asylum seeker, a protected person, a person who has been granted asylum, a person part of a refugee contingent or a victim of civil war or people who are illegal ("unerlaubt"). According to the BKA, nearly 300,000 cases were registered in 2016 in which at least one immigrant was arrested on suspicion of committing the crime. Although the total number of incidents reduced in 2016, the number of crimes committed by refugees witnessed a clear increase. But it would still be difficult to make a direct correlation between refugees and the increase in criminal incidents, according to Christian Pfeiffer, criminologist and former justice minister of the state of Lower Saxony. The behaviour of refugees depends a lot on their chances of staying back, making some groups more prone to criminal activity than others. "There are for example the North Africans, who, soon after they reach Germany, get to know that they don't have any chance of staying here. They are then frustrated and angry and behave like we witnessed in New Year's Eve in Cologne [December 2015]," Pfeiffer says. These persons are also under pressure to stay back and make money by working illegally or becoming criminals, he adds. The real reason for rising crime According to Pfeiffer, studies show that Syrian and Iraqi refugees tend to commit lesser number of crimes because they don't want to spoil their chances of getting a legal permission to stay in Germany. A rejected asylum application consequently means no access to language or integration courses. "Thus, there is a kind of a class-based society that emerges among refugees - ones who have good prospects and those who don't," Pfeiffer explains. Finally, even those who have a good chance of staying often get involved in criminal activities if they are forced to live with many people in temporary shelters and sometimes even with communities that they are in conflict with in their home countries, he adds. In 2010, nearly 70 percent of the population in Germany consisted of people who were over 30 years old. A majority of the over one million refugees who came to Germany in 2015 were between 14 and 30 years of age - for Pfeiffer, the main group responsible for a majority of crimes committed anywhere. "A small group is in every part of the world extremely dangerous - young men between 14 and 30. 70 percent of most criminal activities are done by them. Among refugees, this group of males makes up for 37 percent of all immigrants," making the crime rate among immigrants much higher, Pfeiffer says. "This explains why 100 Germans will have a lesser crime rate compared to 100 refugees, because among Germans, the people are older and there are more women, he explains." This age group is also the reason why more sexual assaults are being reported, Pfeiffer adds. Foreigners and natives But could the connection between refugees and a rise in crime lead to a kind of racial profiling of refugees and of immigrants in general? A similar discussion cropped up earlier this year when Cologne police reported hundreds of North African men who were behaving in an aggressive manner at the city's central station. A year ago, on New Year's Eve 2015, hundreds of women were sexually assaulted and robbed by immigrant men, believed to be of North African origin. For Pfeiffer however, racial profiling is out of the question since that is not the intention. "The police need to deal with these suspects and naturally register the fact that they belong to these groups of people who are experiencing a severe crisis...There is no racial profiling taking place," Pfeiffer says. For him, the facts speak for themselves. "Refugees are not meaner people, but they are differently placed in the [social] structure. Police statistics only show what people have reported, very little comes from the police's own observations," he adds. However, one needs to take into account that the number of complaints against foreigners is always higher than complaints against people of one's own ethnicity. " If Max is assaulted by Moritz, then the chances of registering a police report are 19 percent," says Pfeiffer, using two ethnic German names as an example. But if Max is assaulted by Mehmet - a typical name for a Turkish man - the chances of reporting the crime go up to 29 percent, he concludes.

First published on April 4, 2017

© Copyright DW – All rights reserved

DW is not responsible for the content of external websites

Source: DW 

Text initially published on: Deutsche Welle