There are two ways of looking at the world when it comes to crime. There is one of the "police criminal statistics" (PKS), the Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) has presented this Tuesday. "Of course, every offense is one too many, but objectively, this is the lowest value in decades," Seehofer said.

And the minister is right. The total number of processed offenses without alien-law offenses decreased by 3.4 percent. Domestic burglary, street crime, handbag robbery, personal injury, bicycle and car theft: all of these offenses were recorded by the police in 2018 more rarely than in the previous year, in many cases as rare as in decades.

And then there is a second view of crime that arises in surveys of the population. This view was presented at the same press conference, and things are different. Overall, "no fundamental change in the crime rate of the citizens between 2012 and 2017 is detectable," writes the Federal Criminal Police Office in the "German Viktimisierungssurvey" (DVS), for 2016/2017 more than 31,000 people in Germany were questioned representative. As a result, for the most part, crime has not declined but has remained constant or even increased, in a few exceptions.

How is that possible? Is one of the statistics wrong?

Not at all. Criminologists are largely agreed that only so-called bright field statistics such as the PKS and darkfield studies such as DVS taken together provide a nearly realistic picture of crime.

Rather, the differences come from the fact that the numbers are by no means as "objective" as the quote by Interior Minister Seehofer suggests. For while the PKS depicts the view of the police, the population was asked about their personal victim experiences in the victimization survey. Both can fit together but need not - as the following three examples show:

Example 1: Domestic burglary

What the police say: The number of burglaries in police statistics has risen sharply after 2012. The police established special commissions in many places in order to investigate the perpetrators, but the reconnaissance quotas remained poor at about 15 percent. Since 2015, the number of cases processed has fallen again, but in 2016 it was still higher than in 2012. One suspect of the investigators is that foreign gangs have moved on to Scandinavia.

This is what the population says: The survey of the population in the DVS in the years 2012 and 2016/2017 shows a trend similar to the police statistics. The number of burglaries per 1000 households increased from 17.9 to 26. In particular, the number of attempted but failed burglaries increased significantly.

The fact that the two statistics point in the same direction is not surprising. Domestic burglaries are traditionally among the offenses that are most often displayed by the victims of the police, even for the insurance. This gives the investigators a fairly complete picture of burglary crime. It will be interesting to see whether the decline in the PKS can be confirmed in dark field studies after 2016/2017.

Example 2: Fraud

The police say: The number of fraud cases in police statistics has been rising for years, from 2012 to 2017 by a good ten percent. After theft, fraud is the second most common crime the police ever deal with.

This is what the population says: DVS was not generally asked about fraud, but about fraud on goods and services. This includes, for example, when someone orders a product but does not get it delivered. But a rise in the PKS is not measurable in the entire German population - in 2012 and 2016/2017 each gave about five percent to have been victims of fraud.

Especially the area of ​​fraud shows how inappropriate the police statistics are alone to describe the experienced crime of the population. Often companies and not people are victims of a crime here. In recent years, for example, several major investigations into accounting fraud in the healthcare sector have been completed and thousands of cases have been committed in the PKS. It should undoubtedly be a formidable crime, but without any direct impact on the security of citizens.

And it is even more complicated, as the example of the call center gangs shows: These operating from abroad perpetrators have already polluted by investigators about one million Germans, and rising. But these crimes do not appear in the PKS, because crime scenes are not recorded abroad. Even in the population survey, they have not yet put down. This shows how difficult blanket statements about crime are.

Example 3: Robbery

The police say that the number of robberies has plummeted from 2012 to 2017 - from around 9500 to 7880. That's a drop of 15 percent.

That's what the population says: Few people ever become victims of robbery - but their numbers are rising and not falling. The number of robberies per 1000 inhabitants has increased from 9.4 to 14.8 between 2012 and 2016/2017. The fear of robberies has also increased.

Here is an explanation difficult. One possibility would be that victims rarely report robberies to the police. But that is not the case, as the DVS has determined. The so-called display frequency remained constant at around 30 percent from 2012 to 2016/2017 (which means that the police have never heard of two-thirds of all robberies).

The BKA wants to investigate the discrepancy in the number of robberies in a further analysis in more detail. However, according to the authorities, the findings say that "the situation in this area of ​​crime has intensified and more attention should be paid to it."

A realization that only receives who looks at both views on crime.