We Must Be Strict About Recording Ethnicity of Criminals.

I was perturbed to read recently that the number of criminals whose ethnicity is being recorded by police has decreased. Indeed, for some crimes there has been a five fold decrease in this information. It seems that, despite numerous child grooming - shouldn’t they be called child sexual abuse? - scandals, police are still too nervy to gather this information in case of bovine calls of ‘raaaaaaacist’ from people who don’t understand the importance of statistics and of course the criminals they are inadvertently shielding from scrutiny.

Back in 2010, the number of sex offenders for whom there was no recorded ethnicity was only 15%. Now it is 29%. Similarly, for robbery, the number of people for whom the ethnicity was not noted as recently as 2020 was 23% but it’s now 44%. In Hampshire, 58% of people convicted for sexual crimes against children over the past five years were recorded as having ‘unknown’ ethnicity. It is not difficult to look inside someone’s passport, and note not only their nationality and their place of birth (which may be quite different) and also to ask them about their heritage.

Why does it matter to record ethnicity in criminals? Not, as some in the English Defence League might erroneously believe, because some races are inherently superior to others. No, it’s because we all know that the way a person turns out is a combination of genes and environment. The latter depends on factors such as the way you have been brought up - have you been brought up to think of women as inferior, or white women as ‘slags’? Have you been brought up by antisemites, racists or homophobes? Have you been brought up to believe in freedom of speech or are you likely to approve of punishment of those who criticise your beliefs? Do you have an inherent belief that intelligence is linked to the amount of melanin in a person’s skin? If you hold such dangerous beliefs, you are much more likely to act on them.

Nurture is not only dependent on parents, of course, it’s also dependent on who the individual hangs around with. We’ve all heard of people being radicalised in a particular setting, be it falling in with extremists in prison, at the mosque, or being taken along to an EDF meeting.

It’s only by looking at the way some become disposed to particular crimes that we can think of ways of tackling them. There will be multiple factors involved in causing any radical change of behaviour. But of course many criminals don’t radically change their behaviour, they’ve always been predisposed to antisocial behaviour and simply ramp it up or become repeat offenders.