Foreigners and Crime: The Latest Data

"Resident foreign nationals pose a security risk." This was one of the statements included by the analytical institute STEM in its survey of the Czech public conducted in January 2025. The result: almost two-thirds of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement. Another survey conducted by CVVM in 2023 showed that the majority of Czechs (52%) considered foreigners living long-term in the Czech Republic to be the root cause of the increase in crime.

But is there a direct correlation between the number of foreigners and crime? Also, which nationalities contribute to crime the most v. the least? And what types of crime do they commit? Let's take a look at unbiased official data and find out the answers to these questions.

More foreigners = less crime. However...

Let's start with the most basic question: is there a positive correlation between the number of foreigners and the level of crime? Here the situation is quite clear – no. While the number of foreigners in the Czech Republic has been growing pretty steadily  over the past 30 years, the number of registered crimes has been declining for a long time. As the graph below shows, ten years ago the police registered a total of a quarter of a million crimes. There were about 460,000 foreigners living in the Czech Republic at that time. Since then, the number of foreigners living in Czechia has risen to more than 1 million, but the number of crimes has dropped by more than 70,000.

That said, there is a link between foreigners and crime. This has to do with the fact is that foreigners are involved in crimes at a slightly higher rate than their representation in the  population would suggest. As our next chart shows, this phenomenon had been decreasing steadily and briefly disappeared altogether in 2022 with the arrival of war refugees from Ukraine – who were overwhelmingly women and children. However, since then,  it has started to increase again. In 2024, foreigners made up 10% of the population, but contributed to 12% of all crimes.

The main reason for this is pretty predictable, as the Police of the Czech Republic confirm, and mostly has to do with the fact that they tend in settle in urban neighborhoods within large cities, where the crime rate is traditionally highest. This does not have to do with the foreigners themselves as neither migrants nor refugees have a higher propensity to commit crimes. There is no correlation between how many foreigners live in a given locality and its crime rate, Germany's IFO Institute reports.

Basically, migrants are more likely to head to cities, where there is higher population density, a more active nightlife and more people in public spaces at all hours of the day and night. And this means that more crimes will be committed, and the likelihood of foreigners being amoung the perpetrators is also greater. In other words, in places where the police record a lot of “foreign” crime, they are also recording a lot of crimes being committed by locals.

A below average crime rate among Ukrainians

When we look more closely at police and court data, we see that different ethnic groups commit crime at different rates, and sometimes the differences are diametric. Another of our graphs shows the crime rates of the ten most common groups of foreigners in the Czech Republic. It is certainly worth noting how low the percentage of those prosecuted or convicted people from Ukraine in comparison to Czech citizens. We also note that the statistics for people from Vietnam, Mongolia and Russia are also very low, almost negligible. On the other hand, Slovaks, Poles and Romanians, to name a few, are prosecuted and punished more often.

In 2024, of the 78,178 solved crimes, foreigners committed 9,441 of them. The most frequent crimes were endangerment under the influence of an addictive substance/drunkenness, obstruction of an official decision, forgery and the falsification of a public documents, negligent traffic accidents and shoplifting. With the exception of forgery, this list is the same as for the general population. The pie chart below shows the extent to which foreigners are involved in selected categories of crime. An important guide is the 10% threshold mentioned above, which captures the current representation of foreigners in the population. Their participation in economic crime (forgery, fraud) is noticeably high, while their participation in property crime, especially in crimes like burglary and simple theft, is relatively low.

Perpetrators, but also victims

Last but not least, it should be remembered that foreigners and migrants are certainly not only perpetrators in relation to crime, but often also victims. Reliable statistical data on this are unfortunately lacking. Expert studies on the subject suggest that migrants generally underestimate the crimes committed against them, including violent crimes. "The available data on violence against migrants are more the proverbial tip of the iceberg than real numbers," says Marie Jelínková, a specialist in migration and integration at the Department of Public and Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University. She names human trafficking for sexual or labour exploitation and labour market exploitation among the most serious areas of crimes against migrants.

Both of these criminal activities are unfortunately on the rise. Last year, the police registered twice as many cases of human trafficking as in 2023. Reports from the Ministry of the Interior show that the number of cases of labour exploitation is also on the rise. In this context, security authorities perceive war refugees from Ukraine as a particularly vulnerable group.