A 10-year-old child in a department store in Tampere was attacked by a man with a knife. The suspect took two swings at the child but his father was able to stop the attack. Even if the suspect was a white Finn, and fearing a social media storm on social media, the police announced that the suspect “does not have a foreign origin.”
“A person with foreign origin” is code for a non-EU citizen or a person of color.
To put it simply, and if this happened in the UK, the police would write in the statement that the suspect isn’t a person of color, Muslim, Jew or any other minority.
These types of statements by the police racialize crime and cave in to the anti-immigration populism of parties like the Perussuomalaiset.*
Category: Enrique Tessieri