Employee dishonesty in the Federal Republic of Germany, for example, costs taxpayers one billion marks (over $500,000,000, U.S.) annually.

The Hamburger Abendblatt, commenting on the German situation, said: “According to the latest crime statistics, the number of 14- to 18-year-old suspects arrested since 1975 has risen by 25.1%. In the children-under-14 category, the increase has been 30.8% . . . an end to this trend is not in sight. We must reckon with a further increase in the number of delinquent teenagers and children.”

More and more “senseless crimes” are being committed, crimes with no real motive. They may involve simply smearing graffiti on public property or ripping out the pages of public phone books.

But all too often they take a more serious form, one marked by uncalled-for brutality. For example, two 17-year-old boys recently attacked a 33-year-old man on the outskirts of a German city and took turns stabbing him; police afterward reported finding over 80 stab wounds! When asked, “Why?” the two young men answered: “We just had the urge to do someone in.”

Consider the Federal Republic of Germany. As one of the few countries in the world recently showing a decrease in population—between 1975 and 1977 its population dropped by over 600,000 persons—there should have been, to use this argument, a proportionate decrease in crime. However, government sources say that there were 2,919,390 crimes reported in 1975 and 3,287,642 in 1977, an increase of over 12 percent. This shows that crime is increasing even in places where the population is decreasing.

Very few crimes are discovered and reported by police officials themselves. A poll conducted by the German Max-Planck Institute revealed that up to 90 percent of police crime tabulations are based on reports made to them either by the victim of a crime or by witnesses.

This is backed up by the German magazine Der Spiegel, which said: “In truth the number [of burglaries committed during the year] is ten or twelve times higher [than the number reported].” It quoted Werner Hamacher, head of the Nordrhein-Westfalen State Criminal Investigation Office, who likened the number of crimes reported to “hardly more than the scantiest bikini” in covering the body of total crimes committed.