By Enrique Tessieri
There were a total of 860 hate crimes reported in 2010, which is a 15% fall from 1,007 cases in the previous year, according to the Police College of Finland.
Ministry of interior official Ritva Viljanen says that the report sends a mixed signal. “It is a good matter that the total amount of hate crimes has fallen,” she said. “What is of concern is that the number of hate crimes has grown during a longer period.”
The police have registered hate crimes for the past ten years.
As we know, reporting a hate crime by an immigrant may be difficult for a number of reasons, according to a Migrant Blog entry Thursday.
What would the 2011 figures show taking into account the election victory of the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party and the ever-worsening atmosphere in Finland for immigrants and minorities?
We’ll find out next year.
It could be that a lot of people are too scared to go to the police to report when something happens to them. 860 is still a high number for a country with such a low population. It’s over 2 a day!
Agree with you BlandaUpp. Furthermore. Crimes that have not been reported because of the fear of retaliation, neglect of the police to comply, play-down by emergency call centers or the des-interest of standers-by (see the Mcdonalds attack) can hide many realtime occurrences and are not in the official statistics. I myself know at least 2 of such crimes that have not been followed up by the local police.
Additionally, as long as the research is not fully published the figures do not mean anything to me. What were the research questions? Who drew up the research? What are their interests? Why publish these figures now? The Police College of Finland is hardly an objective organization in this field of research.
Transparency would help to get the “real picture”.
Hi eyeopener: good questions: “Additionally, as long as the research is not fully published the figures do not mean anything to me. What were the research questions? Who drew up the research? What are their interests? Why publish these figures now? The Police College of Finland is hardly an objective organization in this field of research.”
I believe there are more questions out there than answers. What I would be interested in hearing from the police is how they plan to improve their collection and monitoring of such crimes in Finland. It would be nice to hear as well how they plan to fight this type of crime. Hiring people of different ethnic backgrounds to the police force would be a good start.
We could ask as well why there aren’t any significant amount of policemen with immigrant backgrounds never mind the Romany minority. It would be preferable to get visible immigrants. It would boost more credibility between the immigrant community and the police.
I have an intuition that these figures suffer a lot from what is referred to commonly as the black number, i.e. underreporting, due to many possible reasons, one important being the fact that people are not taken seriously when they report a hate crime, another one because people are afraid of (not being taken seriously by) the police, or because they simply think it does not matter, because the authorities send out signals that reporting is useless or even not recommended.
The fact that more and more Persut can get away with constant racist or very offensive comments towards minorities of all kinds (sue the m^t§èrfukrrs I’d say!) is really a fateful sign of where Finland is heading…
.. because ultimately the signal that you give to foreigners is that those kind of racist attitudes are allright and not forbidden in Finland.
–because ultimately the signal that you give to foreigners is that those kind of racist attitudes are allright and not forbidden in Finland.
The wrong message is dangerous. What is even more dangerous is inaction, which is an even louder message.
And you posters are idiots, its published in http://www.poliisiammattikorkeakoulu.fi/poliisi/poliisioppilaitos/home.nsf/files/DB54AA1FE9A222B9C2257925004A8CDA/$file/Raportteja95_Niemi_web.pdf and its from reports what police have to write even if i now go to report that neighbour said poop to me and i demand judgement its in report. No matter if its real or not or if its punishable by law or not. ALL.
Even crimes where someone beats other when other said badly to them are in that report as hate crimes.
Hi Hannu, how are you? Thank you for the link.
For once, Hannu is right.
These figures are not the outcome of any “survey” with “questions”. They are merely an analysis of records generated when complaints are entered in the police (NBI) information system. About a decade ago a checkbox was introduced in this system for recording the perception that the motive for the reported offence was the ethnic extraction, sexual orientation etc. of the victim.
A fifteen per cent year-on-year fall in these figures is a significant development.
Well Hannu. Nice to knowfor Finnish people that there is at least one idiot in Finland. Do I have the right of an asylum here?? And a social security paradise… Or can you address people at least in a common sense behavior!! I wonder how many Finns know this website?? Are you a cop??
Like Enrique says: Hello Hannu how are you?? makes dialogues far more interesting than calling posters of people idiot!! At least it tells me something about violence in your character!!
eyeopener, Hannu is one of our oldest bloggers who has visited Migrant Tales. Sometimes he makes off the wall allegations about immigrants. I hope he will one day leave those terrible websites (Homma and Scripta), which are not good for his or anyone’s brain. What can you learn on a site where everyone agrees to hate a group? Probably the effect it has is it softens the brain and distorts one’s judgement pretty badly.
Hannu may not know it, but Halla-aho and his cronies are actually misinformed about immigrants. Instead of admitting their mistake, they spread their ignorance and make a horse’s *** of themselves. The more Finns learn about immigrants and immigration more of the horse we’ll see.
Can you imagine, Hannu, what would happen to this country if these types of people had their way? I feel sorry for Finland.
Even thought I disagree more about Hannu’s opinions than I disagree Enrique’s, I still think it it good to have both “forces” in this blog. These kind of people balances the right- and left wing opinions little bit and makes more discussion. Otherwise it would be boring to read these sites if everybody would just agree 100% about everything. Even some ideas might be little bit “extreme”.
The Finland I would like to see in the future would be a mix of these two “ideologies”. And no, I don’t mean just immigration policy.
Hannu
– “…its from reports what police have to write even if i now go to report that neighbour said poop to me and i demand judgement its in report. No matter if its real or not or if its punishable by law or not. ALL. Even crimes where someone beats other when other said badly to them are in that report as hate crimes.”
No wonder the police are telling people not to report a hate crime, if this is such a drag to them, to have to write a report! And also very interesting Hannu that the only cases you can imagine are where the immigrant is somehow in the wrong and the Finn is merely defending themself from ‘poop’ or being beaten. I guess that you means you simply have racism blindness. Or am I wrong, Hannu, you do see and acknowledge genuine acts of hatred by Finns against foreigners for no provocation?
I have some sympathy in regard to compiling the statistics. For a start, if no record is made of ethnic origin of the victim, then race crimes are completely hidden. That almost certainly is a worse scenario than having a box where all complaints are logged. Second, if you only record actual convictions, there’s a good chance that you would only get a very tiny fraction of racist crimes showing in the figures, the reason being that the majority of crimes are not convicted for lack of witnesses, evidence or cause to proove that the crime was motivated by racism. So while this is a blunt instrument, it’s at least better than no reporting at all or only reporting of convictions.
Niko. I’m not sure that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are adequate ways of describing anti-racism vs. anti-immigrationist discussions. There are many people I know who are on the right generally but who are very positive about immigrants, even if they generally want to see proper controls of immigration. I prefer this topic to be seen as a human rights issue.
I suppose a lot of Finnish women and girls are not reporting racial/sexual harassment, as we in San Francisco learned not to do. It becomes par for the course when darker races mix into a liberated society like Finland, where women are not covered up (except in Winter, ha ha!).
But if the race or gender of the person reporting is not included in the data, then perhaps Finnish people are waking up to the possibility of using the “hate crime” sticker in their own defense. I did have one flasher in the woods near the Rouhuvouri Metro station, but he was only a male, not a nonwhite, so I never reported the poor lost soul so desperate for attention.
Mary Mekko
Even though your thoughts are usually quite extreme, but I have to admit that this time you are right. All my female friends has been harassed by non-white immigrants and it happens all the time to young teenagers (just visit in Rautatienasema or Itäkeskus). If the girls are not interested of them, then they call them as “racist”, which I found ridiculous. Still none of my female friends has not reported about these incidents, because they know that wouldn’t help anything. I don’t agree with that, but it is not up to me.
I don’t say that native Finns don’t do such things, of course they do. But from my friends experience the person who does the sexual harassment is usually not native. I think native Finns mostly harass the girls in the bars when they are drunk and immigrants harass them more publicly.
But I guess I’m just “far right supporter”, “racist” or something like that, because I say anything negative about immigrants. Most of them are good and valuable for the society, but these people definitely are not.
Niko, finally you admit what all Finns know: this street harassment is rampant by immigrants. Finnish young women are often scared, and certainly going to the police seems absurd, since it is long, time-consuming, will never come to court and lead to no good ending for the victim (or her family, who will want “no trouble”).
I say, Finnish women should learn aggressive tactics, e.g. swearing in the filthiest words of the attacker’s native language. Learn the Somalian and Arabic words for “motherfucker” and so on, every known curse word, and spew it at them EN MASSE, yes, attack in groups. Of course, keep it at the legal verbal level, so that you cannot be called a racist. Just lay on these guys what they’re dishing out. No need to cut their balls off, as would happen in their own villages, if they did it to their own women!
Finnish women are some of the toughest I’d ever met, calm and cool and determined. They can come up with some interesting, ice-cold techniques to stop these criminals. Also, they can lay into the police with a slew of cellphone photos and recorded insults, and besiege the court system with a demand for action, by using the internet press. Raising the awareness of the people through outrage is the way to turn things around. Ongoing discussion of rape cases and the preceding “trivial” street harassment should be done in schools, on the internet, on TV talk shows, etc. Never let up – just hammer on the perps, and on the authorities!!! Name the names of judges who let these people off, put their photos and names and criminal neglect of public safety on the front pages. Show their victims’ photos.
Mary Mekko
– “Raising the awareness of the people through outrage is the way to turn things around.”
You are not answering my questions, as usual. So you are outraged at racism against whites, but not racism against immigrants?