A conservative Bavarian party wants to include not just the nationality but the ethnic background of criminals in police statistics. The controversial proposal is rejected by many as populist and misleading.

Currently, police crime statistics (PKS) in Germany list the nationality of offenders but not their ethnicity. The exception is Berlin, where stats on juvenile offenders include information on ethnic origin. In October 2008, police in the German capital also began listing the ethnicity of adult offenders in a test project to gauge whether the information could help in combating crime.

This week, however, Berlin’s Social Democrat Interior Minister Ehrhart Koerting announced that the practice had produced “no satisfying results” and would not be adopted, thereby averting a row within the city’s coalition government.

A majority in both the Social Democratic Party and the Left Party reject the practice, not least because no definitive definition of ethnicity exists.

“It is unclear how far back a supposed ethnic background should be traced,” railed Sevim Dagdelen of the Left Party. “Would there be a special office looking into people’s family trees?” MORE>>>

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Crime, Government, Race & Racism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.