The German police have been left unable to protect the public from criminal migrants due to years of neglect by state governments which have left the force short of thousands of officers.

The remarkable admission was made by a spokesman for the Gewerkschaft der Polizei — the German union for police officers — in response to the comments made by union chief Rüdiger Seidenspinner about the migrant problem.

Union spokesman Michael Zielasko told Breitbart London it was inevitable criminals would travel to Europe, remarking: “of course there is a percentage of criminals in this big amount of refugees the police has to cope with”.

Mr. Zielasko said the state forces were hamstrung in the fight against migrant crime by budget cuts, which left them without the manpower to deal with the problem. He said: “It isn’t very easy to deal with this issue because German police has a lack of 16,000 policemen. For years German politicians have forwarded a massive staff reduction”.

Chief Mr. Seidenspinner spoke out yesterday on the migrant crime wave, his potentially controversial comments backed up by statistics which show incomers are between three and four times more likely to commit crime than the general population.

Complaining officers routinely came up against the same criminal migrants time and again, he hit out at the courts and migration system which gave them joke punishments such as unenforceable fines, while failing to deport criminals.

German police were, said the Union representative to Breitbart, stuck enforcing the laws as prescribed by politicians, whether they were effective or not.

The severe under-staffing described by the Police Union as standing at some 16,000 has a serious knock-on effect on not only capacity of the force, but the morale of individual officers. With migrant emergencies and German anti-migration protests taking place daily, taking leave, or even having weekends off are now little more than a “fairy tale”, said Mr. Seidenspinner.