Political Corretness in Europe: Don’t Reveal Ethnicity of Criminals

With a hat tip to a former student out ours: news from Zurich.

Zurich communal authorities have instructed city police to stop releasing the nationality of criminals to the media to avoid stigmatization.

An exception can only be made if the information is “pertinent” to the case, authorities decided on Wednesday, as reported by newspaper 20 Minutes on Friday.

The move was suggested by the political left as a way to prevent the racial prejudice that can arise from releasing the origins of those involved in criminal activity.

But right-wingers counter that releasing such information is a matter of transparency.

Opinions on the issue differ throughout the country.

Police in Neuchâtel and Fribourg only release nationality “if that adds value,” Fribourg police spokesman Gallus Risse told 20 Minutes.

“It’s about using common sense and avoiding stigmatizing a specific nationality,” he said.

However police in the cantons of Geneva and Vaud take the opposite stance.

There, a suspect’s nationality would only be kept secret if it could identify him.

“We wouldn’t say that he’s Chinese if he lives in a small village and he’s the only Chinese person living there,” Pierre-Olivier Gaudard of Vaud police told the paper.

“It’s also a question of transparency,” he added.

You can’t solve any social problem unless you are willing to face the facts, and politically correct people chronically refuse to face facts. And the reason is simple: the facts refute their biases and show that their “solutions” don’t at all address the real problem.

If you believe, for example, that the large number of blacks in prison is the result of racist cops, you’ll do nothing to address crime in the black community.

But the left wants the facts suppressed. Thus a bunch of leftist students at Marquette, back in April, staged a sit-in on Wisconsin Avenue demanding (among other things) that Marquette “Remove race from DPS [Department of Public Safety] reports.”

Whom do they think that would fool?

As we reported at the time:

We analyzed all Public Safety Alerts issued between May 2014 and April 2015 (inclusive), and found that of 44 offenders whose race was reported, 37 were black. (Four were white and three Hispanic.)

Indeed Marquette did, for a while, conceal the race of people committing crimes near campus. But we outed the policy right here. Marquette got chewed out by Charlie Sykes, and perhaps because of that (or perhaps because the Clery Act might leave a school open to a suit if key information is not reported) it changed the policy.

People who try to promote their political agenda by concealing information should be assumed to be on the wrong side of any issue. People who are willing to face the facts, and see the truth come out, are those with whom we should instinctively side.