Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Victorian Police Commissioner fudges African crime statistics

From the Herald Sun:

Best intent can't fudge Sudanese, Somali crimes

Andrew Bolt
November 21, 2008 12:00am

CHRISTINE Nixon yesterday confirmed it. She did mislead us on crime rates of African refugees.

It's actually four times worse than she'd claimed.

But the Chief Commissioner admitted this only accidentally, after misleading you again in the Herald Sun with more fudged statistics.

Just before last year's federal election, Nixon embarrassed the Howard government's immigration minister, Kevin Andrews, by contradicting his warnings that the crime rates among Somali and Sudanese refugees were high.

Not so, said Nixon: "Those Sudanese refugees are actually under-represented in the crime statistics."

She was silent on the crime rate among Somalis, but repeated: "The young Sudanese who actually come into custody or dealt with us, only really make up about 1 per cent of the people we deal with . . . (W)hat we're actually seeing is that they're not, in a sense, represented more than the proportion of them in the population."

I wrote here on Wednesday how police and census figures showed Nixon had said something untrue - and had helped to (unfairly) damn Andrews as racist.

The crime rate among these refugees was in fact anywhere between four and eight times higher than that for the rest of us, despite VicPol's apparent attempts to have fewer Africans charged or prosecuted.

A furious Nixon had a letter of denial published yesterday in the Herald Sun. But what I find astonishing is that it again plays with figures to deny a problem obvious to even Nixon's most junior officer in Fitzroy or Flemington.

Excuse me, but I will quote every laborious word of it so Nixon cannot again claim she was misrepresented:

Andrew Bolt's claims in today's paper misrepresent me and make claims that I misled the community. I strongly refute this and would like to set the record straight.

When we look across the state, 1.2 per cent of people in Victoria were processed as an alleged offender in 2007/08.

Of the African born population -- 63,513 people -- 816 or 1.3 per cent were processed as an alleged offender. These are similar to the figures for 2006/07.

Our crime statistics also show that of 60,923 alleged offenders, 316 were born in Sudan, representing just over 0.5 per cent of all offenders processed.

This is the highest rate for all African born offenders in Victoria. People from Egypt, Mauritius, and South Africa all have larger populations living in Victoria, and they reflect 0.11 per cent, 0.10 per cent and 0.14 per cent of the offender population respectively.

So for Mr Bolt to claim that "African refugees were over-represented" is just wrong. If Mr Bolt wants to question my integrity, perhaps next time he could get his facts right.


Some of you will have immediately spotted Nixon's most obvious trick.

I had talked specifically about the crime rate among refugees from war-torn Somalia and Sudan.

To contradict me, Nixon now gave crime figures for all "African" immigrants, including law-abiding Jews from South Africa, businessmen from Egypt, farmers from Zimbabwe and trained workers from Mauritius.

That's not who we're talking about, Chief Commissioner. That's not the people your officers fight in the streets.

Nixon's letter does not mention - or dispute - the figures I drew from her own police statistics that show Somali immigrants are in fact four times more likely than other Victorians to be charged with crimes.

But it does let drop a figure Nixon hasn't released before - that 316 Sudanese were dealt with for alleged crimes in the latest year of records.

What Nixon fails to add is that with just 6200 Sudanese in Victoria, this means about one in 19 Sudanese each year gets picked up for alleged crimes - more than four times the one-in-83 rate for all Victorians.

Bottom line: Nixon last year claimed Sudanese were "underrepresented" in crime figures, but her own statistics show they are overrepresented by a factor of four.

I agree, this figure may be too high because Sudanese immigrants are on average younger, and the young are more prone to crime. But it may also be too low, because police are slower to arrest Africans, and don't always record their place of birth.

Whatever, they are Nixon's best figures and show I was right. Chief Commissioner, you did mislead us on crime among African refugees.

You may well feel that this will better help these traumatised newcomers to fit in, and I admire your good heart and many of your efforts to help them.

You may even be right to worry that telling the truth as I do will hurt more than help. But forgive me if I no longer trust what you say on this topic.

Original article

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