The text at the bottom of the left statistics shows why this is a bad graph. Only 191 TV subjects from 270 reports, only 30% had origin mentioned. When looking for a suspect it makes sense to mention the origin of the suspect you are looking for.
This is what it should look like with the missing unspecified people readded. Still more foreign mentioned than specifically Deutsh mentioned, which can be explained away with photos or assumption that a white suspect is Deutsh and only specifying when it is ambiguous.
There’s a lot of defaultism at play here, and to be honest, it’s not the type of defaultism that should necessarily be criticised. If you’re in Germany, you expect most things to be done by German citizens, and therefore the tag of “foreigner” is treated as an exception to that, therefore it gets mentioned.
Making it illegal or difficult for news stations to say the origin of criminals would only make it worse. Then the narrative would be that every crime was committed by foreigners and that’s what the right wing would push. Perhaps it would be better to make it mandatory to mention the origin of criminals, that way there could be no obfuscation of facts, but then if there’s a high profile crime committed by a specific minority, innocent and unrelated people from that same country of origin could get targeted for no reason other than xenophobia.
There’s no easy solution to this, but claiming that it’s all racism instead of complex human interactions where there’s also bound to be some racism is not the way.
The text at the bottom of the left statistics shows why this is a bad graph. Only 191 TV subjects from 270 reports, only 30% had origin mentioned. When looking for a suspect it makes sense to mention the origin of the suspect you are looking for.
This is what it should look like with the missing unspecified people readded. Still more foreign mentioned than specifically Deutsh mentioned, which can be explained away with photos or assumption that a white suspect is Deutsh and only specifying when it is ambiguous.
There’s a lot of defaultism at play here, and to be honest, it’s not the type of defaultism that should necessarily be criticised. If you’re in Germany, you expect most things to be done by German citizens, and therefore the tag of “foreigner” is treated as an exception to that, therefore it gets mentioned.
Making it illegal or difficult for news stations to say the origin of criminals would only make it worse. Then the narrative would be that every crime was committed by foreigners and that’s what the right wing would push. Perhaps it would be better to make it mandatory to mention the origin of criminals, that way there could be no obfuscation of facts, but then if there’s a high profile crime committed by a specific minority, innocent and unrelated people from that same country of origin could get targeted for no reason other than xenophobia.
There’s no easy solution to this, but claiming that it’s all racism instead of complex human interactions where there’s also bound to be some racism is not the way.