In the 1990s John DiIulio, a conservative American academic, argued that a new breed of “superpredators,” “kids that have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future,” would terrorize Americans almost indefinitely. He was not alone. Experts were convinced that crime would keep rising. Law-abiding citizens would retreat to gated communities, patrolled by security guards. Politicians and police chiefs could do little except bluster and try to fiddle the stat

Journalism professor Thomas Hestermann’s team at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg compiled their 2025 findings for the Berlin-based Mediendienst Integration, a research service for journalists that focuses on migration, integration and asylum. The results are alarming: “Foreign suspects are mentioned about three times more often than their share in police statistics.” A year later, about 1 million migrants arrived in Germany, around one-third of whom h