German Police Officer Blows Whistle on Migrant Crime Cover Up in Police Stats

A senior police officer from Bonn has blown the whistle on what he describes as a glaring gap between the reality of crime on German streets and what appears in official statistics.

His testimony was published in a commentary by political editor Till-Reimer Stoldt in Die Welt. The officer, given the pseudonym “Bernd,” has worked on the police force for 30 years.

In a lengthy conversation with Stoldt, he said crime had become “much more migrant-oriented” since 2015, but this was barely visible in either police reports or the media. “They mostly only talk about ‘men,’” he explained, adding that the omission “really worries” him and his colleagues.

According to the Welt piece, Bernd described cases of sexual assault at concerts and in swimming pools, and brutal incidents of street violence, where “the perpetrators were always foreigners.” Yet their nationality, he said, was almost never made public. “Something isn’t right. And many of my colleagues share this feeling,” he told Stoldt.

The article draws attention to official crime figures that seem at odds with frontline perceptions. Police crime statistics (PKS) for 2024 showed 35.4 percent of all suspects nationwide (excluding immigration offenses) were foreigners, who also made up nearly 40 percent of violent crime suspects. That is despite foreign-born individuals comprising 16 percent of the population. But Bernd argued that these numbers still understate the issue, because suspects with dual nationality are almost always recorded only as “German.”

He explained how police are required to fill out two nationality fields when processing suspects. Yet only the first nationality appears in state and federal statistics.

“In some cases, these were guys who spoke Arabic to each other the whole time. The only thing they said in German was ‘shitty German’ – to me. Initially, I noted the non-German nationality in the first field,” Bernd recalled, “but these files were immediately returned – along with a note from my superior telling me to enter ‘German’ as the first nationality so that it would appear in the statistics. I was speechless… I’m supposed to register them as Germans? That makes me feel like a liar!”

The interior ministry has confirmed that in 2024, one in six suspects with a German passport also held a second passport. Given that dual nationals account for less than 10 percent of the population, this suggests a disproportionate representation in crime.

The commentary also highlights the effect on morale within the police force. “Younger colleagues in particular are sometimes afraid to talk about foreign perpetrators,” Bernd said. Offenders, he added, exploit this hesitation by playing the “racism card” when confronted. He described one altercation with a young man who spat on the ground and hissed “racist” after being reprimanded.

In response to such concerns, North Rhine-Westphalia’s Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) has announced that, from now on, all nationalities of suspects will be counted and published in the state’s statistics. “The proportion of non-German suspects will therefore increase there. That makes sense,” Stoldt wrote. “If a group of perpetrators appears disproportionately often, there is a problem. But you can only solve what is identified as a problem.”

The Greens and SPD have accused Reul of “stirring up resentment” and racism with the policy change, but Stoldt insists that this underestimates the public. “The people are not that slow-witted,” he wrote. “Most foreigners are, of course, not criminals. Of 14.1 million, around 913,000 were suspected of crimes in 2024. Why should the public be too slow to recognize that the overwhelming majority of foreigners are not criminals — even if they disproportionately often commit crimes?”

The commentary concludes by urging trust in both the public and the police. Police chaplains, Stoldt noted, have confirmed that officers are trained to distinguish between a criminal minority and the law-abiding majority. “Perhaps the SPD and the Greens now just need to learn to trust the police and the citizens a little more,” he wrote.