Injustice in court Following the shooting by Gökmen T. in a tram in Utrecht, the Forum voor Democratie (FvD) party leader Thierry Baudet directly linked immigration policy and criminality. Are people with a migration background really more criminal, or are they treated differently by our legal system? American Professor Janet Thompson Jackson, who teaches at the University of Groningen, says: ‘Nobody is immune to prejudices.’
By Zvezdana Vukojevic
W
hilst the police in Utrecht tried to locate the escaped suspect Gökmen T. on 18 March 2019, FvD leader Thierry Baudet was at an election meeting in The Hague. He already had the answers to all the questions: ‘If people want more of these kinds of problems, they should vote for Rutte, because he throws the borders wide open and does nothing to solve the integration problems.’ The link between Moluccan, Surinamese, Turkish, Antillean and Moroccan Dutch citizens and criminality has been studied since the 1980s. Are they more 26 | New Scientist | special diversity matters
criminal than the native population? Studying the figures, you could draw the conclusion that in criminality some demographics are overrepresented. In contrast to what some opinion makers and politicians want you to believe, this has been kept anything but quiet for years. In 1993, the then PvdA (Labour) Minister for Welfare, Health and Culture, Hedy d’Ancona, already made a plea for a ‘pragmatic and formal migration policy’, whereby it ‘must not be a taboo to discuss and deal with criminality of immigrant youths.’ When Piet Hein Donner was the Minister of Justice, he said that criminality figures demonstrated that non-Western immigrants ‘do not engage much with society’. Right-wing politicians also made themselves heard. There was, for example, the notorious statement by PVV leader Geert
Wilders in 2014, who was allegedly talking about criminal Moroccans when he got an audience to chant ‘fewer, fewer’. In an interview with a German magazine in 2017, he said: ‘Moroccan youths are represented 22 times more often in street crime.’
Is that true? The question is whether such statements present the facts correctly. Take that factor of 22. That is high. For that reason, the news checkers from the University of Leiden investigated the figures. The Monitor Jeugdcriminaliteit (Youth Criminality Monitor) 2010 report by the Research and Documentation Centre (WODC) states the number of suspects related to their proportion of the population, per 1,000 individuals of the relevant population group. In 2008, the proportion of suspects among Moroccan
