GERMANY - Crime by Foreigners Inflated

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 had fled the civil war in Syria, while a fifth came from Albania and Kosovo. Since then, Hestermann has observed a “drastic distortion” in the German media when it comes to crime and migration.

He described different reactions he observed using the example of two attacks that took place in Munich and Mannheim in 2025: “Munich: A young Afghan man allegedly drives into a crowd, killing two people. Shortly afterwards in Mannheim: A German man also drives into a crowd, killing two random victims.”

And what happened in the media? Public broadcaster ARD aired a prime-time report on the attack in Munich, but not about the one in Mannheim. Altogether, the study counted twice as many mentions on German TV and in newspapers about the crime involving the foreign suspect.

Criminologist and sociologist Gina Wollinger calls this media distortion a “migrantization” of crime. The professor at the University of Applied Sciences for Police and Public Administration in North Rhine-Westphalia argued this was caused by what she called an overemphasis on culture.

-www.dw.com, 18 October 2025

Commentary: Exaggerating crime statistics is not just limited to Germany, but is practiced worldwide to a certain degree.

Some time ago, we published crime statistics about illegal immigrants, clearly showing that this group of “undocumented immigrants” is committing less crimes than the general population: “Regarding crime, the respectable Cato Institute (libertarian think tank) confirms: ‘The results are similar to our other work on illegal immigration and crime in Texas. In 2018, the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 782 per 100,000 illegal immigrants, 535 per 100,000 legal immigrants, and 1,422 per 100,000 native-born Americans. The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45 percent below that of native-born Americans in Texas.’”

There is another issue we have to deal with, which is more important; namely, hatred of foreigners—those other than ourselves.

During Nazi rule in Germany, all foreigners were negatively represented, but the prime targets were Jews. Subsequently, the most horrendous mass murder took place under the Nazi regime, when about 6 million Jews were killed just because they were Jews.

Back to the beginning: In Genesis 3, the couple ate fruit from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. After they had committed this sin, God confronted them and called to Adam: “Where art thou?” They were hiding in the garden. When God asked Adam, “Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” (v. 11b), Adam quite naturally blames the woman: “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (v. 12).

Next in line was the woman. She too had an excuse: “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat” (v. 13b).

The German news agency Deutsche Welle documents that TV reports for 2025 expose 94.6% of crimes committed by foreigners, and only 5.4% by Germans. Newspapers are not far behind, reporting 90.8% of crimes by foreigners, 9.2% by Germans. In contrast, actual police reports show that 34.3% of crimes are committed by foreigners, and 65.7% by Germans.

This blame game continues throughout human history to this very day, but it will cease when the Prince of Peace governs the world with truth and righteousness. Until then, we, the Church of Jesus Christ, must shine as lights in an ever-darkening world, demonstrating the reality of the peace “which passes all understanding.” We need to follow the Lord’s commandment: “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40).