When Berlin’s minister for the interior presented the 2002 police statistics, he introduced a new feature: from then, the statistics differentiated between German and non-German offenders and as in youth criminality there was always a difference between these two groups, this decision appeared to be very sensible. In 2005, one in eight male German adolescents in Berlin committed a felony which meant a decline; in the non-German group it was one in three and here the number was rising. These numbers represent a reality, in which this small proportion of all immigrants creates racist prejudices against the whole community.

The result can be seen everywhere, anti-immigrant ideas and jokes like “What do you tell a Turk in a suit? – The accused shall stand up” become more popular. But Turks are a community that enriches Berlin in countless aspects e.g. music, sports, food etc. So it is crucial that both prejudices against immigrants and immigrant criminality are fought against. This is a hard job. On one hand politicians must do a lot of work to create more tolerance and on the other hand police need to drop unnecessarily exaggerated anti-racism to achieve the latter. Having crime statistics for both Germans and non-Germans is a good start.