Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/18/germanys-crime-rate-lowest-i.html
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Cue a bunch of far-right assholes claiming the statistics are wrong, that the German government is trying to hide the immigrant crime for unspecified reasons, and that even if the statistics are true, that doesn’t matter because people’s lived experience is different.
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Damn, I was about to say all those things, but in my Steven Colbert voice. (The old one, not the new one.)
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Ah - so that’s why the crime rate dropped so much in Germany:
“TD Trump Deutschland AG (German for “TD Trump Germany AG”) was a venture by Donald Trump planning to trade and build skyscrapers in Germany.”
“The company was dissolved in April 2005.”
Drumpf’s German-American - maybe he can be deported?
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That’s because the punishment for any crime in Germany is getting personally shamed by Angela Merkel. Instant criminal reform.
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I think Germany banned tetraethyl lead in gasoline in 1996, same as the USA. So if the lead/crime hypothesis is as solid as it appears to be, their crime rate should continue to drop.
Of course you can still find leaded gasoline at the pumps in Algeria, Iraq, Yemen, and North Korea; and until recently in Afghanistan and Myanmar.
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I actually moved to Germany in October of last year, and it’s pretty fuckin’ great. Good food, GREAT beer, friendly people. Plus six weeks’ paid personal leave per year and national healthcare, but that goes without saying. More importantly for me, funding rates for the sciences in Germany are way, way higher than they are in the USA.
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Maybe the new US role in the world is “cautionary tale.”
“We could cut funding to science and education, but just look at what happened to the US.” [sad murmuring, funding maintained]
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There’s a lot of things that have changed since then. Not sure how one picks just one out.
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And now that the Audi CEO is arrested… even lower?
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Uh… sure you’re not actually in the German speaking part of Belgium by any chance?
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The reason tetrahethyl lead’s affect on crime can be separated out from the effects of things like legalized abortion and changing patterns of intoxicant use is that records have been kept of lead levels in children and lead was phased out in different geographic areas at notably different dates. The Wikipedia article, although not exceptionally friendly towards the hypothesis, has links to the major papers; it’s really quite good science.
To put it another way, there are clearly other major factors at work, but very few of them have such strongly quantifiable indicators.
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At the same time, the general public’s felt crime rate in Germany is 1000x higher than ever before.
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I’m fairly certain the violence in Yemen isn’t the result of lead poisoning.
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I’m not, but Belgium is also great. However, I moved here after a year in Japan and five in Australia, so my bar for great beer may be set lower than most Europeans’ are.
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I live in Germany by the Belgian border. Life here is good but Belgians definitely rule when it comes to beer, food and character 
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Sod off!
You can keep that bastard, we don´t want him.
I wished I could say he is your problem, but he is everybody on this planets problem, but only you Yanks can do something about it!
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Yeah, me too. But perhaps removing TEL from gasoline (or even just the type of social change that would make anti-pollution legislation possible) is one of many things that could be done to improve the futures of children living in Yemen? Germany’s Green Party has been both a result of positive social change and an instigator of it, although they seem to have fallen on hard times lately.
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I wouldn’t object if others decided to do something about him. Nope.
