German police played down New Year’s Eve violence concerns, stating most arrests were of adult German males, but a leaked list of suspects suggests the truth may not be exactly as the authorities wished to portray.
Anxiety about migrant crime, and particularly on New Year’s Eve, has been heightened in Germany for years after the mass sex attacks in Cologne in 2016 and burnings in Berlin in 2023. Yet an apparent attempt to take the heat off migrant communities appears to have stumbled after a police list of suspects was leaked to a German “right wing populist news portal”.
Analysis of the list of 256 first names of “German nationals” showed, Nius.de claims, that most people on it have names commonly associated with migrant communities. Only a minority have recognisably German names. The report states:
…the majority of the German suspects clearly have a migrant background – and in many cases Muslim first names. The list of German perpetrators begins with Abdul Kerim, Abdulhamid, Abdulkadir, Abdul Karim and Abdullah. The first name Ali appears eight times in the list of those arrested, Hassan three times, Mohammed (in various spellings) twelve times, Youssuf (in various spellings) six times.
In all, Nius asserts that while migrant-background people make up 40 per cent of Berlin’s population, the list could indicate they accounted for 80 per cent of the arrests.
That the leak was genuine has since been confirmed: the report has subsequently been carried by establishment German publishers and Berlin police have launched an investigation into the leak. Police spokesman Florian Nath told broadcaster RBB that not only was leaking the list probably illegal, but doing so was fueling discriminatory attitudes because of what it had revealed.
Berlin police for their part had stated after New Year’s Eve that hundreds of crimes including destruction of property and injuries were recorded, but that most of those arrested were Germans. Per the official figures, there are 670 suspects and 406 of these were “German nationals”.
The list leak appears to underline again the obfuscating effect of handing out large numbers of passports to newcomers when trying to understand emerging criminal trends. While this method of inferring migration background from forename is not totally precise, it has been used before in bids to get a clearer look at reality in a system which by accident or design restricts real data on immigration and crime.
As reported last year, the release of a list of the forenames of all men suspected of gang rape crimes in one German state starkly illustrated what was claimed to be a predominance of migrant-heritage suspects. “A clear trend is evident”, it was stated.
A similar approach was tried by the University of Copenhagen in Denmark in 2015, which found the top-ten criminal forenames in the country for men were all at the time of “Arabic origin”.
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