September 24 2019
The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) estimates the total damage caused by organized crime in Germany to about 691 million euros. This emerges from the federal situation “OK” for the year 2018, the BKA President Holger Münch and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer want to present in Berlin and about the “world” already reported in advance. In 2017, the damage amounted to 209 million euros.
According to the situation report, the sharp increase in the sum of damages is mainly based on the reported losses in property and economic crime as well as tax and customs offenses. The number of OC investigations has since declined by 6.5 percent to a total of 535. However, the BKA does not give the all-clear because the “damage and threat potential” of OC groups is still high. Clan crime, the participation of immigrants and connections between “OK” and terrorism were included in the situation report for the first time. To the OK, the BKA also expects rock crime and Italian mafia organizations. In the analysis of crime areas, it is noticeable that the drug-related drug-related offenses (201 cases) fell slightly by 2.9 percent.However, a large proportion of OC groups continue to commit crimes in this crime field. In the area of property crime, the number of OK procedures with 93 and a share of 17.4 percent, according to the BKA, remained “relatively constant”. These two crime areas once again accounted for more than half of all reported OC cases (294 out of 535). It is noteworthy that the number of OC groups in smuggling crime increased by 3.9 percent to a total of 53 (2017: 51).
This continues the trend of recent years. A total of 6483 OC suspects (including 2023 Germans, 4460 “non-Germans”) were registered by police, including 464 (7.2 percent) suspected immigrants. The BKA defines a person as an immigrant as well as in the police crime statistics (PKS), which include, for example, asylum seekers, tolerated and quota refugees. Out of a total of 535 OC procedures, 87 were identified as suspects – this corresponds to 16.3 percent. Crime areas in which immigrants have been identified as suspects include narcotic trafficking and smuggling (37 cases), property crime (16 cases) and criminal smuggling (15 cases). For the first time, the BKA has also included 45 OK procedures in the situation report, which it ascribes to “members of ethnically isolated subcultures” (clan criminality). Almost half of these cases were conducted by the police and judiciary in North Rhine-Westphalia.
