Why is Germany’s Crime Rate Soaring?

this video was brought to you by brilliant last month Germany released its crime statistics for 2023 and in more bad news for the German government the total number of crimes recorded in Germany was up 5.5% year onye and 10% higher than the pre-pandemic level on top of that the German Sunday newspaper V amont which gained exclusive access to the data said that violent crime was rising at an especially fast rate climbing 9% year on-ear to a 15-year High unsurprisingly these numbers have sparked a political kafuffle in Germany with the right blaming the government and the recent influx of migrants and the left attributing it to Germany's socioeconomic decline so in this video we're going to take a look at Germany's emerging crime crisis its possible causes and how it might affect both German and European politics before we start if you haven't already please consider subscribing and ringing the bell to stay in the loop and be notified when we release new videos so let's start by looking at the data for most of recent history Germany has been one of the safest countries in Europe according to data from the late 2010s Germany had some of the lowest burglary rates homicide rates and incarceration rates in all of Europe or bit a slightly higher than average assault rate this is pretty consistent with the The Stereotype of Germans as people who love rules and Order and according to the European crime index which basically Aggregates all of this data and gives an overall value for how unsafe a country is Germany was the safest large country in Europe including France Italy the UK and Spain from 2012 until 2015 and the second safest after Spain for the remainder of the decade and even this wasn't because crime in Germany spiked in the 2010s but mainly crime in Spain fell in fact aside from a slight spike in the mid-2010s Germany's crime rate that is the total number of crimes relative to overall population has been steadily declining for most of the past few decades falling from about 8,000 crimes per 100,000 people to about 6,500 in 2019 the last year before the pandemic and ultimately this is kind of what you'd expect for most of this time the German population was getting both wealthier and older and in General Rich old people commit fewer crimes than younger people and over this time the types of crime also changed with there generally being fewer violent crimes and more nonviolent crimes including stuff like drug related crimes and online fraud however in the past couple of years this trend has apparently reversed in 2022 the overall crime rate Rose from 6,000 per 100,000 people to 6,700 but this was mostly a attributed to the end of covid restrictions and was similar to the pre-pandemic level of 6,500 however according to the government's newly released statistics in 2023 the total number of crimes Rose yet again to 5.94 million which implies a rate of about 7,000 per 100,000 people the highest figure since 2017 but perhaps most worrying is the DraStic rise in violent crime reversing a decades long trend according to Stats the total number of violent crimes climbed 8.6% to 214,000 cases the highest figure since 2010 now this was mostly driven by a 7% increase in cases of dangerous and serious bodily crime with 154,000 recorded cases the highest figure ever there was an even steeper 17% rise in Theft with 45,000 recorded cases and a 10% rise in knife attacks with 9 th000 recorded cases now urban areas saw the steepest increases with Berlin being particularly affected burglaries in the capital for instance Rose by an astonishing 35% in just the past year and the city is now the least safe part of the country unsurprisingly these numbers have caused a bit of an uproar in German politics with the Christian democrats demanding an emergency debate in the bundar a few days after the data was published in that debate both the Christian democrats and other socialist conservative parties including the afd blamed the rising crime on immigration noting that 41% of all suspects were people without German citizenship despite representing only 15% of The Wider population and that the number of non-german suspects Rose by nearly 18% compared to 2022 while the number of German suspects Rose by only 1% now this number in some way overstates the real fraction of crimes committed by foreigners because itcl includes immigration law violations which obviously can't be committed by Germans even if we take those numbers out though the proportion of foreign suspects did increase 2.5% year on-year and stood at 34% in 2023 the data also suggests that the number of violent crimes committed by foreigners Rose by roughly 15% in 2023 and those that are German passport are now responsible for nearly 60% of all violent crime as well as tightening borders the CDU has also expressed support for offshore processing schemes akin to the UK's Rwanda scheme and certain CDU politicians have called for Germany to return migrants to other EU countries like Italy on the other side of the political aisle while the SPD admit that immigration is having an impact and have promised to speed up the deportation measures for foreign criminals they nonetheless insist that the government won't significantly amend its immigration policy and will instead do more to integrate migrants into German Society certain SPD politicians have have also blam the increasing crime on the politically destabilizing effects of inflation and weak economic growth and other politicians on the German left have argued that blaming the race solely on immigration ignores the other confounding variables including for instance the fact immigrants are generally poorer and younger now this debate kind of mirrors a similar situation in Sweden which has also seen a steep rise in crime recently where the right blame it on immigration while the left blame it on integration or rather the lack thereof ultimately whatever the case and whoever's right the new crime data presents the government with two difficult problems the first is political obviously high crime rates are never good news for an incumbent government but on top of that polling suggests that most Germans already think that Schultz and Co are too weak on immigration a poll from late last year for instance found that roughly 2third of Voters thought the government was letting in too many Asylum Seekers and these numbers will only make things more difficult for them the second problem is economic integrating migrants not to mention the increased cost of policing associated with higher crime all cost money but the combination of weak economic growth and the fdp's aversion to any significant increase in borrowing means that Schultz doesn't really have money to spend and finding more would probably involve further cuts to public spending elsewhere which wouldn't be popular with either the German public or the more fiscally liberal parts of his Coalition especially the greens which leaves him without anywhere really to turn ultimately underpinning this topic is a lot of data whether that's economics trade patterns polling or demographics a lot of the time with politics you just have to understand the data so if you want to get a better grasp on these kind of things I'd recommend brilliant and they've just introduced a whole bunch of new data courses which are perfect for Learners of any level taking you through everything from Bay's theorem to multiple linear regression it even uses real data sets from the likes of Starbucks X and Spotify in order to bring things to life I'm not even a super mathematical person and I still found it easy and enjoyable to work through and that's because of how brilliant is designed built around learning by doing with thousands of interactive lessons in maths data analysis programming and AI the good thing is that like I mentioned earlier you can learn all of these things quickly and easily because Brilliance courses are split into easy to 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