Monday, January 07, 2008

Scary statistics from Turku

Turun Sanomat has published an article about the crime committed by foreign-born people in Turku. The statistics included foreign citizen resident in Turku, foreign-born Finnish citizens, and tourists.

It is no news that on average foreigners commit somewhat more crimes than Finns. Usually, however, the statistics are not as awful as in Turku last year.

About 6% of the residents of Turku are foreign-born. Foreign-born people, however, are the suspects in 34% of sex crimes, 21% of batteries and 37% of robberies and extortions.

As usual, they mention that because of a higher percentage of the young people among the foreign-born population, the somewhat higher level of crime is to be expected. However when they break it down by age, in the 15-20 age group the statistics are even worse: they commit almost 36% of sex crimes, 42% of robberies and extortions, 37% of batteries and almost half of the aggravated batteries in their age group.

The statistic would probably be even more amazing if broken up by the country of birth. Somehow I seriously doubt that those are Swedes and New Zealanders doing all that crime out there. Even though according to a earlier study Russians, Estonians and Swedes in Finland commit a little more crime than native Finns (whereas for example Brits and Germans commit less). Even though from listening to the immigration debates one can conclude otherwise, about 1/3 of the foreigners in Finland are EU citizens, and another 1/3 are the citizens of other civilized and semicivilized countries.

It would be interesting to know all about these people in the Turku crime statistics. Nationality, age, sex, religion, the year they moved to Finland, profession, marital status, educational attainment, who their parents are or were, how many will get convicted, how many of those will get sent back to where they came from, and how many of those who won't will commit more crime.

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