The testimony given to Welt’s political editor highlights how foreign crime is underreported in official data.
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.