THIS STORY WAS UPDATED
The Finnish police have at the most 10 Internet police officers who monitor hate speech, reports Yle, citing police inspector Måns Enqvist of the National Board of Police of Finland.
The news was published after the far-right Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party claimed that too many police resources are being wasted to monitor the Internet for hate speech.
At most, ten officers working on monitoring the Internet is too little, and Finland should allocate more police resources.
Moreover, we should not forget that crimes like ethnic agitation and hae speech and hate crime exist because they protect vulnerable groups like migrants and minorities. Scrapping such laws, like the PS is demanding, is to leave migrants and minorities open to hostility and aggression.
Despite the small number of police officers monitoring the Internet, one of the problems in tackling hate speech in Finland is that too few are charged and brought to justice.
Is this because there are too few police resources?
It may well be.
* The Perussuomalaiset (PS) party imploded on June 13, 2017, into two factions, the PS and New Alternative, which is now called Blue Reform. In the last parliamentary election, Blue Reform was wiped off the Finnish political map when they saw their numbers in parliament plummet from 18 MPs to none. A direct translation of Perussuomalaiset in English would be something like “basic” or “fundamental Finn.” Official translations of the Finnish name of the party, such as Finns Party or True Finns, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and racism. We, therefore, at Migrant Tales prefer to use in our postings the Finnish name of the party once and after that the acronym PS.