Law enforcement officers cannot agree on a position on hate crimes

Within a few days, representatives of various law enforcement structures published information related to crimes of an "extremist orientation" and hate crimes in the Moscow region, and each time new data was heard.

Moscow Prosecutor Yuri Semin was the first to speak on this subject, who on April 7, 2008 announced that at present the Moscow City Prosecutor's Office is investigating "more than 30 cases of attacks on people on the grounds of xenophobia" .

Literally the next day, April 8, in the program "Facing the City", the head of the capital's police department, police general Vladimir Pronin, said that "during the first two months of 2008, about 60 crimes motivated by extremism were registered in the capital and three criminal cases were initiated to initiate ethnic strife" .

And on April 9, the head of the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor General's Office, in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, said that "extremist crimes, unfortunately, have gone up. Last year, for example, their number increased by more than 35 percent. The alarming trend continues in the first quarter of this year, especially in large cities. The investigation of a number of the most complex cases of this category is controlled by the Investigative Committee. In Moscow alone, over the past few months, 25 murders and attempted murders committed by organized criminal groups motivated by ethnic hatred have been uncovered."

about the difficulties of interpreting the data voiced by Y. Semin We have already written .

The same problems arise with the rest of the statements. Unfortunately, it is almost never clear what law enforcers mean by "extremist crimes" - hate crimes, terrorism, something else, or both. Departmental inconsistency and the lack of uniform principles for accounting for such crimes, apparently, explain the discrepancies in quantitative indicators. However, the voicing in a short period of time by different officials of various and hardly comparable statistics on the same issue gives an outside observer the impression of the absence of a unified position of law enforcement agencies on this issue and the lack of interaction between law enforcement agencies, even at the level of information exchange about crimes.

In addition, it is necessary to pay attention to the context that almost always accompanies such statements.

In particular, in the same program “Facing the City”, V. Pronin specifically drew attention to the crimes committed by immigrants from the Caucasus, and two weeks earlier, A. Bastrykin, speaking about the need for a special group of investigators on hate crimes, emphasized that “first it is necessary to look at crime among people from the Caucasus", and very transparently linked the activity of neo-Nazi groups precisely with "Caucasian" crime.

Not only do such statements themselves have either hidden (as in the case of V. Pronin) or undisguised (A. Bastrykin) xenophobic overtones, they directly disorient public opinion, switching it from rational and operational reasoning about the motive (hatred, self-interest, etc. ) .p.) to emotional and non-rationalizing arguments about the ethnicity of the criminal ("Russian who killed a non-Russian", "Caucasian who robbed his grandmother", etc.).

Thus, disagreements in assessing the scope of hate crimes, and the context that accompanies such statements, give rise to doubts about the competence of the officials making these statements, their impartiality, and also provide huge opportunities for xenophobic speculation. The closest example of the latter is one of the headlines on the moderately nationalist website Pravaya.Ru - "The Moscow police department believes that there are no organized skinheads in the city, but there are aggressive migrants . "

Sources

• Latukhina Kira. Bastrykin "lived" to extremism // Vedomosti. 2008. March 26.
• Yamshanov Boris. Investigation from a clean slate // Russian newspaper. April 9th.
• Skinheads are indignant: "Why doesn't the head of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate notice us?" // New news. 2008. 9 April.
• The Moscow police department believes that there are no organized skinheads in the city, but there are aggressive migrants // Right.Ru. 2008. 9 April.