Of course it is true. But it is also a politically charged misrepresentation. Another case of lying with statistics. If you control for the socio-economic background of young foreigners, you see that the difference becomes much less marked. At least a criminologist I saw on German teeveee last week stated that there was little difference.

This issue is complex. What the Mehmet case illustrates is that the right offers up a symbolic solution (extradition) which it can't carry through. For instance, you can't deport a young Greek because he's an EU citizen, and you can't deport a young Turk who lives in Germany because of a treaty, signed at the EU level. It conflicts with EU law, it conflicts with the European Convention on Human Rights, and it probably also conflicts with the German Verfassung. So, it's never going to hold up, but yet the right keeps pounding its symbolic drumbeat of deportations. Purely for electoral purposes, in this case.

We had the same nonsense going on in Italy a few months ago with regard to Romanians.

Originally, I was concerned with how the left could win such a debate, but the right has since completely lost control over the developing media story, so DoDo and I did a rundown of how that happened.

What I did find out in the mean while is that there is a large amount of debate among criminologists about which approach will work and that I am largely unqualified to comment upon it. If you have the time to read the wiki article on zero tolerance, you will find that it is (in some parts) written from a POV that is outright hostile to that approach.