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.