The police are counting more violent crimes and more foreign suspects. Criminologist Tobias Singelnstein warns that the statistics say little about real crime.
Interview: Lenz Jacobsen
The police crime statistics (PKS) for 2023 will be presented on Tuesday, and the first figures are already known. According to these, the number of possible crimes registered by the police has risen by 5.5 percent compared to the previous year. Tobias Singelnstein is a professor of criminal law and criminology and analyzes the figures in an interview.
ZEIT ONLINE: Mr. Singelnstein, the PKS measures significant increases in several areas. Has Germany become less safe and more criminal?
Tobias Singelnstein: We don’t know that. Because the PKS figures hardly say anything about the actual development of crime in Germany. It’s bizarre how they are overinterpreted year after year in the public debate.
ZEIT ONLINE: What does the PKS measure, and why is it so uninformative?
Singelnstein: The PKS is a police activity report, nothing more. It simply records all suspicious situations that come to the attention of the police – usually through private reports. The statistics only reflect what the police can see and want to record. The PKS is treated as the gold standard of crime measurement. But it is only the tin standard.
ZEIT ONLINE: Among other things, the PKS reports significantly more violent crimes, 8.6 percent more than in the previous year. So that’s not true?
Singelnstein: First of all, that just means that the police have dealt with more cases. This may also be due to the fact that more cases are reported. When we interpret the statistics, we have to ask which crimes end up with the police and which do not. Research has shown, for example, that people who are perceived as not belonging to their own group are more likely to be reported.
ZEIT ONLINE: But that would mean that foreigners tend not to go to the police when they experience violence from other foreigners. According to the police, such acts make up a very large proportion.
Singelnstein: These figures also need to be put into perspective. Some of the cases were recorded in collective accommodation, for example, where social and official control is much more intensive. It’s usually not the residents who call the police, but the caretakers and managers of the accommodation. This is a completely different level of control than in a tenement building, where many conflicts are settled informally. However, this is not taken into account in the statistics. These are distortions that should actually be factored out if you want to find out something about the actual crime situation. I’m generally bothered by this division into German and non-German suspects.
ZEIT ONLINE: Why?
Singelnstein: Because it says practically nothing in the context of crime, but serves racist discourses. Even if there is a particularly high level of violence in collective accommodation, for example, this is due to the living conditions there and the social situation of the residents, their age structure and other factors. And not because of which passport they have in their pocket.
ZEIT ONLINE: But the statistics don’t say anything about the reasons, only that there are a particularly large number of suspects without a German passport and that many crimes take place in collective accommodation. That is a legitimate observation and a problem that politicians should address.
ZEIT ONLINE: What do you mean by that?
Singelnstein: Dangerous bodily harm makes up the largest proportion. That sounds bad at first. But this category includes all situations in which two people interact, no matter how brutal or harmless it is. So if two people get into a conflict with a third person and slap them in the face, that counts as dangerous bodily harm. Public perception, on the other hand, is dominated by spectacular individual cases, knife attacks and serious injuries, which, however, only make up a small proportion of the statistically recorded cases.
ZEIT ONLINE: What would help to get a better picture of actual crime?
Singelnstein: Ultimately, most interpretations of the changed figures are no more than guesswork. We simply don’t know exactly whether there are statistically more cases in certain areas simply because, for example, the police are acting differently or those affected are more likely to report them than before. More detailed scientific research would be needed to find out. The Federal Criminal Police Office began conducting regular surveys some time ago. Respondents are asked about their experiences with crime so that we don’t just rely on what the police receive and record. But it will be some time before these surveys can be used to identify longer-term trends.
Interview by Lenz Jacobsen from April 7, 2024 from ZEIT ONLINE. © All rights reserved. Made available by ZEIT ONLINE GmbH.