On 17 May, a 14-year-old girl was raped at the Allner See in Hennef. The proceedings against the 27-year-old man will begin soon in the youth protection chamber of the regional court. On the evening of 10 June, a man tried to rape a 25-year-old woman on the Kennedy Bridge. While fleeing from police, he jumped into the Rhine and was caught. It transpired the 27-year-old had already attracted attention after an attack against a student several weeks earlier in the late evening outside Café Blau at the university.

Three individual but dramatic criminal incidents from the region that all have something in common: all three suspects arrived in Germany either as asylum seekers or illegally during the large influx of refugees. Sexual crimes are a particularly sensitive area after the numerous attacks on New Year’s Eve 2015/2016.

Even before this, violent incidents in refugee accommodation had shocked the Bonn public. Law enforcement agencies seldom use dramatic words, but it happens. The internal police shorthand “Nafris” for North African repeat offenders triggered political debates at the start of this year. And at the end of 2015, high-ranking security officials warned in a letter to the Federal Government that German authorities, “are not and will not be in a position to solve these imported security problems and the consequent reactions of the German population” in the face of uncontrolled mass immigration via the Balkans.

Two years later, by comparison, the current assessment of the situation by Bonn police seems matter-of-fact. Spokesman Frank Piontek says for 2017, data available up to August shows, “a general decline in the number of cases of total crime.” Bonn police are predicting a slight decrease in the proportion of non-German suspects. In relation to the entire criminal spectrum, police say this was 34.4 per cent in 2016 and 32.8 per cent in 2015.

In absolute figures, Bonn police dealt with 5239 suspects who did not have a German passport in 2016. The proportion of crimes is 29.3 per cent (2015) and 32.7 per cent (2016) when all those crimes, which can only be committed by foreigners, such as breaches of residency rules, are excluded. At the same time, by no means every person without German citizenship is one of the around 5000 “immigrants” currently living in Bonn. This is how the statistics refer to all those connected with the wave of refugees.

In 2016, immigrants accounted for less than ten per cent of registered criminal activity nationally, which still seems high given their low single digit share of the total population. At the same time, the news over the last two years has supported the impression that immigrants are especially prevalent in certain types of crime.

The retail association HDE campaigned for tougher handling of shoplifters in a pointed letter to the German government and parliament. With regard to criminal migrants from the Maghreb and Eastern Europe, the association wrote: “It is clear that the security situation in Germany has worsened in the last few years and politicians must react to this.” In several randomly selected shops and department stores in Bonn city centre, no one wanted to comment and no reason was given.

Meanwhile it is evident that there are some problem clientele among the asylum seekers, resulting in calls for help by the Bonn Foreign Nationals Office during the summer. Due to repeated aggression against employees, the administration was given a nine-man security service by the council for another year.

On the other hand, there seem to be fewer problems in refugee homes and another area of crime has remained low up to now: “Politically motivated crimes towards immigrants and attacks on asylum seekers’ homes are the exception,” said police spokesman Frank Piontek.

(Original text: Rüdiger Franz / Translated by Kate Carey)