Hamburg is one of the most thoroughly culturally-enriched cities in Germany. The relentless enrichment has had a predictable effect: an increasing percentage of residents don’t feel safe in their own homes or on the street.

Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from Tichys Einblick. The translator’s comments are in square brackets:

Every third Hamburger hardly dares to go outside at night

Since June there has been a survey on Germans’ sense of security. With good reason, because the news it contains is not good, as the example of Hamburg shows: around half of the people in Hamburg no longer feel safe using public transport. 60% of women do not dare to go out alone at night.

SKiD — that means “security and crime in Germany”, and is a representative survey that was commissioned by the Federal Criminal Police Office and has since been published without much media attention. It is about the so-called dark field research, so the survey should allow a more complete picture of crime in Germany than the police crime statistics offer. The “resident population aged 16 and over” was surveyed. The languages available were German, Turkish, Russian and Arabic. A good 45,000 questionnaires were evaluated for this purpose. According to the BKA, the study is “designed to be repeated regularly”. Comparisons with the past are hardly possible due to the lack of similar studies.

In Hamburg, the state police’s SKiD report is required to be public. It is online in a “Version 1.0” from June 2023. However, since the results do not always fit the narrative, it was put online in an inconspicuous place so that no curious citizen would stumble upon it right away… Around 23,000 Hamburgers were contacted from November 2020 to January 2021 through paper and online questionnaires. As is well-known, this was the time marked by Corona measures and it is suspected that the changed life had an impact on the answers. One can neither prove nor disprove it. However, it is obvious that the citizens surveyed drew their experiences and memories from the pre-Corona period. In any case, the resulting image remains highly topical and relevant. In Hamburg there were around 8,500 answered questionnaires that can be evaluated. Slightly more women (4,520) than men (3,862) completed the questionnaires.

In any case, there must be a reason for the move. So let’s start with the most important results, as explained by the Hamburg police in a few boring but informative paragraphs (with a link to the entire report).

Accordingly, almost all Hamburgers feel safe in their apartment and residential area during the day. Surprise! Where else should security be guaranteed? In local public transport (ÖPNV), that’s not true for 11% during the day. And only around two-thirds of Hamburg residents (69.7%) feel safe in their own neighborhood at night. This also means that almost a third (29.2%) no longer dare to go out at night. 22% often no longer leave the house alone. This applies above all to women who, in addition to burglaries, have recently feared in particular sexual harassment. The fear of rape and sexual harassment as part of “normal” life has joined the classic burglary. Only around 60% of unaccompanied women feel safe at night.

The experience of criminal offenses greatly increases insecurity

Overall, only half of Hamburg residents feel safe using public transport at night. But — the authors of the study tell us — this is still a good value in the national and large-city average. This in turn means that less than half of the users on average feel safe in German subways and buses (exactly 46%; among women: 33%; men: 60%). A third of those surveyed in Hamburg avoid public transport at night as much as possible. Nationwide, this even applies to 37% and 52% of women.

But the “most beautiful” thing about this first paragraph about the “spatial sense of security” is the last two sentences. According to them, “the feeling of security at night in the residential area” is “established as a standard indicator of the general, spatial fear of crime”. The “feeling of (un)safety” expressed by the Hamburg residents interviewed was “non-specific, which is primarily more related to personality and group characteristics as well as special external circumstances than to crime”.

The citizens’ feeling of insecurity would therefore have nothing to do with anything — apart from the specific “personality and group characteristics” and some other “external circumstances”. But how exactly do the evaluators know this? It seems just as plausible that bloody personal experiences together with frequent reports of crime have led to a changed sense of security. Incidentally, a quarter of Germans also feel unsafe in their own residential area in the SkiD’s nationwide survey. Almost two-thirds of all German citizens surveyed are somewhat to very concerned about becoming a victim of physical harm.

Garbage, groups hanging around and graffiti underline the feeling of insecurity

Once you’ve experienced a crime, your concern will multiply by a factor of two to three, and even more so in the case of physical harm and sexual harassment. These are drastic experiences that leave their mark. So it’s no wonder that half of Hamburg residents “frequently to very often avoid certain streets/squares/parks” (nationwide: 44%; women: 58%) or avoid “strangers on the street at night”. 14% have an emergency call app installed on their cell phone. 2.6% and 3.6% carry a high-pitched alarm or an irritant gas, 1.1% a knife, and 3.9% have completed self-defense training or practice martial arts.

Almost one in three Hamburgers (28%) feels alarmed by burglary. One in four fears being robbed, almost one in five (approx. 18.5%) is worried about being affected by physical harm and sexual harassment. These are rather abstract numbers, but they indicate concrete fears. In principle, the respondents were more concerned about property crime than violent crime. Both types of crime occur on streets, squares, on buses and trains; often one thing leads to another. Interestingly enough, the fear of fraud on the Internet is most pronounced (38.3 percent feel worried about this) — despite this, most Hamburgers do not forego financial transactions on the Internet.

92% of the Hamburg residents surveyed still like living in their residential area. At the same time, however, there are warning signs that tell of a perceived descent: almost half of them often or very often notice the littering of streets and green spaces in their own district. About a third perceive “groups hanging around”. A fifth notice graffiti and inappropriate noise. Rarely (less than 10%) are vandalism, quarrels and fights in public spaces noticed.

The difference between Germans and non-Germans

Finally, it is interesting to what extent people with and without a migration background feel safe. During the day, people with a migration background feel a little less safe than “people without a migration background”, i.e. Germans. [I guess they’re afraid that the police are more alert and will pounce on them more easily while they are committing crimes.] The differences are greater at night, and the relationship is reversed: Germans now feel significantly more insecure than people with a migration background.

In contrast, “people with a migration background” fear much more frequently that they will become victims of prejudiced crime, terrorism and physical harm. They are also more likely to engage in martial arts to protect themselves from crime. This can be related to very different factors, such as the residential areas where the migrants live. Germans without a migration background, on the other hand, more often protect themselves against burglary. Incidentally, the average fear of crime in Hamburg-Mitte and Hamburg-Harburg is significantly higher than in many other districts.

According to the BKA report, every second victim of physical harm nationwide suspects that they were attacked because of “group-related prejudices” — if nothing else, this also illuminates the progressive tribalization, the transition to the multicultural tribal state in Germany. [Shows you clearly how well these measures for integration work. I could have saved them a lot of money and told them that for free.] Of course, there should also be groups other than ethnic groups. Incidentally, men are more likely to be the victims of crime overall; only in the case of sexual offenses and partnership violence is it different.

Afterword from the translator:

Why are they so surprised that this will happen? Isn’t it obvious? When you invite all of the third-world criminals into your country you shouldn’t be surprised that crime spirals out of control and gets real violent. But common sense is something those puppeticians, placed into seats of power by the puppeteers, do not possess. Common sense is after all something that no “(s)elected” puppetician should ever have. Should they display even the most miniscule shred of it, their political career will be terminated, one way or the other. A serious popular revolution is needed to turn things around, but these will now become seriously bloody because of the complacency of the “electorate” for such a long time. I guess that’s why they invented “consumerism”, and made it so addictive to the masses that they can no longer see clearly what’s in front of their own eyes and noses. I wonder if I will go to my grave, after having fought this fight almost all my adult life while being called names, without having seen even a partial victory against these evils that are being perpetrated for such a long time against humanity by the select few. I hope NOT.