As of: March 8, 2024, 1:55 p.m
By: Florian Neuroth
Comments
Press
Split
Around 186,000 people were recently surprised by a letter from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).
But the recipients have no reason to worry.
Wiesbaden - It's not every day that a letter like this, which has been found in almost 200,000 German mailboxes these days, is in the mail.
After all, the sender, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), is certainly not one of the authorities with which most people have regular mail.
The recipients don't have to worry, because the authorities are not contacting you without a reason, but certainly not with a malicious ulterior motive.
So the BKA is turning to German citizens with a request: For the second time, the authority is sending out paper questionnaires as part of the Security and Crime in Germany (SKiD) survey and asking them to fill them out or, alternatively, to take part in the survey online.
In this way, one could “make an important contribution to improving the security situation in Germany,” writes the BKA online.
A sign points to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).
The authority recently sent letters to around 186,000 people in Germany.
© picture alliance/Fredrik von Erichsen/dpa/Symbolbild
BKA also wants to use a survey to record unregistered crimes - victim survey in unreported study
That's what the survey is about: how safe people feel in certain places, how they assess the work of the police and the issue of crime, and also very personal experiences.
The BKA wants to know, among other things, whether the respondents themselves have ever been victims of a crime.
In this way, the authority tries to identify trends and also wants to use the survey to supplement the police's crime statistics.
The official figures often only tell half the story.
By no means all crimes are officially registered.
The SKiD survey is therefore designed as a dark field study.
The police understand unreported crimes as crimes that they are not aware of.
Commissioned by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the authorities want to record the scope and structure of criminal events in Germany on a larger scale in order to be able to combat crime more effectively and provide effective crime prevention.
In order to be able to assess the overall level of crime, the victims would have to be questioned regularly, writes the BKA.
According to the first study, women in particular feel unsafe on public transport at night, the BKA found
In an initial survey, the BKA wrote to randomly selected participants between October 2020 and January 2021.
One result back then was that those surveyed felt unsafe on public transport, especially at night.
This was particularly true for women.
While sexual violence or intimate partner violence was used against women significantly more often, men were more often victims of crime in general, according to the survey.
A situation report on the topic of domestic violence, which the BKA presented last year, confirmed the findings.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior and Family Ministry started another unreported study, this time explicitly on intimate partner violence.
My news
A fine of up to 10,000 euros: You should not take this everyday object with you in the car
Partial cannabis legalization: Can seeds be bought for cultivation?read
Call back to Dr.
Oetker: Popular product contains mold toxins
Italy is reintroducing traffic rules - violations can cost up to 345 euros in fines
Three public programs will soon disappear from cable network reading
More money for public sector employees: This is how much salary there will be from March reading
In the first edition of the SKiD survey in 2020, a total of 122,700 people were contacted and more than 45,000 took part.
Now 186,000 people aged 16 and over have been contacted.
The randomly selected German citizens were contacted in February 2024.
Only you can take part in the survey.
The name and address of the respondents will not be forwarded to the BKA, the authority promises
Participation is voluntary.
The BKA announced one or two reminder letters for anyone who did not fill out the questionnaire, but those contacted could of course ignore this, according to the BKA.
The authority further emphasizes that the addresses and associated information are stored in separate data sets.
According to the BKA, the answers will be evaluated together.
This is intended to prevent the results from allowing conclusions to be drawn about individual people.
The addresses are only available to the commissioned survey institute and service providers.
“Your name and address will not be forwarded to the BKA,” the authority assures.
The address data would be deleted as soon as it was no longer needed for the survey.
The information from the survey would then be “completely anonymized”.
The BKA wants to announce the results on the project website.
From now on, the surveys will take place every two years.
(Florian Neuroth)