Crime In Germany Research Articles

Implications of discussion on meaning and contents of omission crime in Germany and Japan

Implications of discussion on meaning and contents of omission crime in Germany and Japan

Faithful and fearful: Does religion promote or reduce fear of crime in Germany?

This article complements existing victimological studies on religion by investigating whether religion promotes or reduces fear of crime in Germany. According to the generalized insecurity approach and the theory of social production functions, religion and fear of crime are linked via secularization-induced diffuse insecurities. It is expected that different facets of religion are tied to fearing crime in different ways because the projection of secularization-induced diffuse insecurities occurs only among those individuals whose religious capital is devaluated. Empirical analyses of data from the 2021 German General Social Survey reveal that some religious minority groups are particularly likely to fear crime, religious belief is positively related to fearing crime, and religious behavior is negatively associated with fearing crime. Additionally, religion can promote fear of crime equally in East and West Germany. In conclusion, the study emphasizes the significance of religion in relation to the fear of crime and underscores the benefits of a general theoretical approach.

Same but different? A qualitative analysis of the influence of COVID-19 on law enforcement and organized crime in Germany

Criminological research on COVID-19 and its repercussions on crimes, criminals and law enforcement agencies is still in its infancy. This paper fills that void with regard to the influence of COVID-19 on organized crime and the work of law enforcement agencies’ investigations of organized crime in Germany by presenting empirical findings from a nationwide qualitative interview study. Through the methodological combination of Grounded Theory and Situational Analysis, we find three central narratives (us vs. them, nationalization vs. internationalization, conservatism vs. innovation) that were provided by law enforcement personnel in terms of the way in which COVID-19 influenced both organized crime groups and their work in the investigation thereof. Following a reflexive approach, the implications of COVID-19 on the research process itself are also discussed.

GERMAN’S BIOLOGICAL THEORIES IN CRIMINOLOGY1 - mapping the beginnings

In this paper, the author explores the early German criminology, pointing out that it was a result of interests stemming from the legalistic approach to crime. For this reason, the contribution of German criminologists to the development of criminology as an independent science is observed by examining the legalistic, anthropological, biological and sociological approaches to criminology. Each of these approaches is concurrently associated with a particular criminological orientation or a period of predominant influence of some criminological approach in explaining causality. The development of the German criminology at the time was reflected in the efforts of psychiatrists to expand their expertise into the field of criminal behaviour and to offer a medical solution to this problem. Tracing the historical development of the German criminology in the course of three different political regimes (including the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and the period of Nazism), the author of this article has an opportunity to assess the political impact on scientific research and its implications. Finally, the recent revival of the biological and genetic research into crimes makes this historical research into criminal biology (from Lombrose to Nazism) highly relevant. The historiography on crime and criminal justice in Germany is well-developed even though the German literature on these issues is considerably less extensive in volume than the respective literature in France and England. The knowledge of the social history of crime in Germany during the 19th and 20th century is still extremely limited. In the last decade of the 20th century, there were some significant developments in this process. In mapping the early development of criminology in Germany, Wetzell identifies the following historical periods. The first period is the beginning of the 19th century, marked by the learning of Lombroso on the inborn criminal offender as well as by the growing impact of the new criminal law reform in Germany. The second period involves the impact of the German reception of the Lombroso’s theory on establishing criminal psychology in Germany from 1880- 1914. The third period reflects the learning of criminal sociology, i.e. accepting the idea on the impact of social conditions on the development of crime. The next period covers the predominant position of the biological research in criminology at the time of the Weimar Republic. Finally, the last period in the development of the earlier German criminology is the period under the Nazi regime (including the sterilization of criminals as well as the Nazi policy of sterilizations of some ethnic groups).

Methods of terrorism financing: criminal procedural obstacles to the prevention of crime in Germany, Liechtenstein, Austria, and Switzerland, by Fabian Teichmann

Methods of terrorism financing: criminal procedural obstacles to the prevention of crime in Germany, Liechtenstein, Austria, and Switzerland, by Fabian Teichmann

Crime in Germany as Portrayed by the Alternative for Germany (AfD)

AbstractCriminal offenses ignite the political debate. Questions about the causes, development, and combating of crime touch on widespread fears; those who make them their subject can be sure of public attention. This Article looks at 242 press releases of the German right-wing populist party, the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland; AfD) from 2018 dealing with criminal offenses. It examines which crime phenomena the reports describe, which perpetrator and victim images they project, and how crime and immigration are depicted as related threats.

Climate of Hate: Similar Correlates of Far Right Electoral Support and Right-Wing Hate Crimes in Germany.

Since 2015, far right parties drawing heavily on radical anti-refugee rhetoric gained electoral support in Germany while the number of political hate crimes targeting refugees rose. Both phenomena – far right electoral support and prevalence of right-wing hate crimes – have theoretically and empirically been linked with socio-structural and contextual variables. However, systematic empirical research on these links is scattered and scarce at best. We combine official statistics on political hate crimes targeting refugees in Germany and far right electoral support of the far right party “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD) in the German national elections 2017 with socio-structural variables (proportion of foreigners and unemployment rate) and survey data collected in a representative survey (N = 1,506) in 2016. We aggregate and combine data for all German municipalities except Berlin which were the level of analysis for the current study. In path analyses, we find socio-structural variables to be unrelated with each other but significantly correlated with both criterion variables in a systematic fashion: proportion of foreigners was negatively while unemployment rate was positively linked with far right electoral support. Right-wing crime was linked positively with unemployment rate across Germany and positively with proportion of foreigners only in East Germany while proportion of foreigners was unrelated to right-wing crime in West Germany. When including survey measures into the model, they were linked with socio-structural variables in the predicted fashion – intergroup contact correlated positively with proportion of foreigners, collective deprivation correlated positively with unemployment rates, and both predicted extreme right-wing attitudes. However, their contribution to the explained variance in outcome variables above and beyond socio-structural variables was neglectable. We argue that both far right-wing electoral support and right-wing hate crime can be conceptualized as behavioral forms of political extremism shaped through socio-structural and contextual factors and discuss implications for preventing political extremism.

The internet effects on sex crime offenses - Evidence from the German broadband internet expansion

This paper studies the effects of the introduction of a new mass medium on sex crime in Germany. I use unique data on criminal offenses and broadband internet measured at the municipal level to shed light on this issue. In order to address endogeneity in broadband internet availability, I exploit technical peculiarities at the regional level that determine the roll-out of high-speed internet. Results provide evidence of a substitution effect of internet exposure on sex crime. The substitution effect is neither driven by differences in reporting behavior, nor by matching processes at the victim and offender side. This suggests that the consumption of extreme media plays an important role in explaining the documented high-speed internet effect.

Regional Market Income Inequality and its Impact on Crime in Germany: A Spatial Panel Data Approach with Local Spillovers

AbstractEconomic theory predicts a positive effect of an increase in income inequality on the prevalence of crime, but the international empirical evidence is mixed. For Germany, research on this topic is virtually non-existent. Therefore, I used fixed effect regressions to estimate the effect of a market income inequality proxy on property damages, thefts from motor vehicles, domestic burglaries and assaults in Germany. The models without spatial lags suggest economically small to moderate own-district elasticities between 0.13 and 0.95. The models with spatial lags generally show insignificant own-district estimates, but significant spatial spillovers.

НАСИЛЬСТВЕННАЯ ПРЕСТУПНОСТЬ НЕСОВЕРШЕННОЛЕТНИХ В ГЕРМАНИИ И РОССИИ: РАЗЛИЧИЯ И ФАКТОРЫ ВЛИЯНИЯ

НАСИЛЬСТВЕННАЯ ПРЕСТУПНОСТЬ НЕСОВЕРШЕННОЛЕТНИХ В ГЕРМАНИИ И РОССИИ: РАЗЛИЧИЯ И ФАКТОРЫ ВЛИЯНИЯ

Immigrant crime in Germany 2012-2015

Number of suspects per capita were estimated for immigrants in Germany grouped by citizenship (n=83). These were correlated with national IQs (r=-.53) and Islam prevalence in the home countries (r=.49). Multivariate analyses revealed that the mean age and sex distribution of the groups in Germany were confounds. The German data lacked age and sex information for the crime data and so it was not possible to adjust for age and sex using subgroup analyses. For this reason, an alternative adjustment method was developed. This method was tested on the detailed Danish data which does have the necessary information to carry out subgroup analyses. The new method was found to give highly congruent results with the subgrouping method. The German crime data were then adjusted for age and sex using the developed method and the resulting values were analyzed with respect to the predictors. They were moderately to strongly correlated with national IQs (.46) and Islam prevalence in the home country (.35). Combining national IQ, Islam% and distance to Germany resulted in a model with a cross-validated r2 of 20%, equivalent to a correlation of .45. If two strong outliers were removed, this rose to 25%, equivalent to a correlation of .50.

Forecasting Crime in Germany in Times of Demographic Change

Studies have shown the impact of a population’s age structure on the crime rate. Germany is — like many other industrialized countries — facing an ageing of its population. This trend will continue in the future: Until the year 2020 the share of younger people aged 14 to 24 years will decrease from 12.3 % to 10.7 % and the share of elderly persons aged 60 years and older will increase from 25.9 % to 30.1 %. Crime is, however, not only influenced by age, other factors also play an important role. Research has shown that the level of social disorganization is especially related to the crime rate. The aim of the present contribution is to explain the crime trends between 1995 and 2010 using multivariate panel estimators that take into account the demographic changes and social disorganization. These models are in a second step used to forecast the crime trends until the year 2020. The data base consists of pooled time-series at the county level from four German states (Bavaria, Brandenburg, Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt). The results show that the age structure plays only a limited role in explaining the past crime trends. The most important factor is residential instability. The forecasts expect a decline of the number of registered offences till 2020. However, the decline will be faster in the eastern states than in the western states and some offences are expected to increase in the future.

East and West, North and South: Spatial distribution and theoretical explanations of violent crime in Germany

Die vorliegende Studie knupft an langjahrige Diskussionen uber die regionale Verteilung der Gewaltkriminalitat an und konzentriert sich dabei auf die Haufigkeitsziffern der Korperverletzungs- und Raubdelikte in den Jahren 2005–2007, die fur alle 413 Stadt- und Landkreise Deutschlands aus der Polizeilichen Kriminalstatistik (PKS) zur Verfugung stehen. Die Variation der Belastungsniveaus ist innerhalb der Grosregionen (Nord, Sud, Ost) auf Kreisebene erheblich starker ausgepragt als zwischen ihnen. Neben Standard-Variablen kriminalsoziologischer Aggregatdatenanalysen – wie Urbanisierungsgrad und relative Armut – wird ein neu konstruierter Faktor „desintegrativer Individualismus“ eingesetzt, dem eine beachtliche Erklarungskraft zugeschrieben werden kann. Er belegt ein kriminogenes Potenzial bestimmter Strukturelemente der Wissensgesellschaft und der Bildungsexpansion. Neben der ublichen Regressionsanalyse werden spezifische Verfahren der raumlichen Analyse (spatial error models) eingesetzt.

Commentary: Right-Wing Extremism and Bias Crime in Germany

Over the past several years, the number of right-wing extremist groups and violence has been increasing, especially since the reunification of Germany in 1990. Most of their members belong to a youth culture centered on racism, neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia. Using official data, this article discusses the nature and extent of right-wing extremism and bias crime in Germany. It also examines the response by the German government to prevent and control these groups. These include punitive and preventive measures.

Insecurities about crime in Germany, Austria and Switzerland: A review of research findings

This paper reviews the research literature on insecurities about crime in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Making criminological studies written in German accessible to the wider European community, we first document how insecurities about crime have been conceptualized and measured in these three countries, and second review the various theoretical positions that have been empirically assessed.We highlight commonalities and differences in the German- and English-language literatures on the topic, making the review relevant to criminologists from all European countries. Our overall goal is to help stimulate a comparative research agenda on insecurities about crime across the European continent.

The Study of the History of Late Medieval and Early Modern Crime in Germany and 'The Birth of Official Criminal Law'

The Study of the History of Late Medieval and Early Modern Crime in Germany and 'The Birth of Official Criminal Law'

The tribunal for serious fraud ‐ the continental European experience

Outlines the extent and nature of white‐collar crime in Germany, and examines the attitudes towards sanctions against this type of offence in the work of the special tribunals in Germany and other countries. Describes how specialisation works on both prosecution and judicial levels, including the position of the court, its substantive jurisdiction, the composition of the court, special training for judges, court caseloads, sentencing practice, guilty pleas and the practice of deals. Includes shorter descriptions of the systems in other European countries: France, Austria, Italy and Spain.

Aggressive Youth Cultures and Hate Crime

Contemporary bias crime in Germany increased dramatically after unification and remained at a relatively high, though fluctuating, level for the decade. Right-wing skinheads and neo-Nazis played a significant role in the violence, but at least one third of the violent incidents came from informal groups of young males who were not affiliated. This represents a shift in anti-Semitic and antiforeigner violence from the 1980s and earlier, when the perpetrators were likely to be older and affiliated with identifiable ideological groups. Contemporary xenophobia is not only linked to aggressive elements of youth culture but appears to be increasingly connected to local and international ideological networks. Electronic media such as the Internet have given both the political and commercial entities of skinhead and right-wing culture a means of support and growth.

Socio-Economic and Demographic Factors of Crime in Germany: Evidence from Panel Data of the German States

Our study is based on the traditional Becker-Ehrlich deterrence model, but we analyse the model in the face of currently discussed factors of crime like demographic changes, youth-unemployment and income inequality. We use a panel of the German Laender (states) that allows us to exploit different experiences in densely and sparsely populat areas as well as in East and West Germany. Our results are based on static and dynamic panel econometrics/criminometrics. They confirm the deterrence hypothesis for crime against property. Only weak support can be observed for crime against the person. Economic and demographic factors reveal important and significant influences. Being young and unemployed increases the probability of committing crimes.

Socioeconomic and demographic factors of crime in Germany: Evidence from panel data of the German states

Our study is based on the traditional Becker-Ehrlich deterrence model, but we analyze the model in the face of currently discussed factors of crime like demographic changes, youth unemployment, and income inequality. We use a panel of the German Laender (states) that allows us to exploit different experiences in densely and sparsely populated areas as well as areas in East and West Germany. Our results are based on static and dynamic panel econometrics/criminometrics. The results confirm the deterrence hypothesis for crime against property. Only weak support can be observed for crimes against the person. Economic and demographic factors reveal important and significant influences. Being young and unemployed increases the probability of committing crimes.