Pubdate: Tue, 08 Jun 1999 Source: Courier-Mail, The (Australia) Copyright: News Limited 1999 Contact: http://www.thecouriermail.com.au/ CALL FOR HONESTY ON ETHNIC CRIME AUSTRALIA had to throw away racial sensitivity to combat a higher level of crime among some ethnic groups, a top criminologist said yesterday. Dr Satyanshu Mukherjee of the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra said Australians had baulked at linking ethnicity and crime. Yet research clearly showed higher relative crime rates for migrants born in New Zealand, Lebanon, Vietnam, Turkey and Cambodia, he said. Figures from census data, jail populations and Victorian police statistics showed some disparities were huge. They showed 92 out of every 1000 Romanian-born Victorians had been through the criminal justice system compared with 33 per 1000 for Australian-born people. The figures were 53 per 1000 for people born in Lebanon, 46 for Turkey and 39 for New Zealand. Of the Vietnamese-born population, 58 per 1000 had been through the justice system. Almost half of the Vietnamese in jail were convicted of drug offences. They also had the largest percentage increase in Australia's spiralling prison population Indian-born Dr Mukherjee told The Courier-Mail a federal database needed to be established. If years of figures showed certain trends "then I think you must consider there are problems in some sectors that particular ethnic groups should look in to", he said. But Australian Council for Civil Liberties president Terry O'Gorman said linking ethnicity and crime could lead to United States-style "profiling" where police pulled over motorists for "driving while black". Mr O'Gorman said even well-intentioned ethnic profiling would compound the problems of how minorities were treated. "It runs the big risk of letting the racist genie out of the bottle. What could be a good intention then starts to become part of the stigmatis ation of all members of a particular racial group," he said. Ethnic Communities Council of Queensland chairman Nick Xynias said he supported any assessment that would "put the record straight and help planners develop for the future with education programmes, health programmes, cultural programmes". But he had been disappointed over the years at talk about ethnic mafias. "It's naive to suggest that because your name is Popodopulous you come from Greece. If the population of this country is made up of 80percent of people who speak a language other than English, it doesn't mean they're not Australian," he said. "Once you've given somebody citizenship they're all Australians." Dr Mukherjee said debates on ethnic groups and crime were based on inadequate, anecdotal information. He said it was not only up to governments to do something about crime but ethnic communities as well. Dr Mukherjee said if proper statistics were compiled they could be used to examine accusations of involvement in crime and to enable communities to investigate the well-being of their members and seek help if necessary. Dr Mukherjee's findings included: A doubling of Fijian-born migrants processed for violent crime from 1993 to 1997. An alarming increase in the number of Cambodian and Vietnamese-born offenders processed for drug offences. Mr O'Gorman said that in the 1970s there was a perception "on the basis of race" that most of the crime in Australia was committed by Aborigines. "Ethnic categorisation is all very well so long as it stays in the hands of people like Dr Mukherjee," Mr O'Gorman said. "My concern is we will have in Australia what is now a serious problem in the US, epitomised in the slogan 'driving while black'. It's a slogan that has arisen from the fact that police stop and frisk black people much more than white people." Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock recently commissioned a review to try to dispel a belief that migrants were responsible for increased levels of crime. It found the crime rate of the foreign population was lower than Australian-born in similar financial and living conditions. It also found that those born overseas were more often than not the victims of crime, while the crime rate of second generation migrants was higher than their parents. - --- MAP posted-by: Don Beck