Researchers from the University of Copenhagen conclude that people with an immigrant background are more often charged without incurring punishment. It should prove that the Danish police engage in discrimination and ethnic profiling – something the police denied. Now it turns out that the researchers missed, and have withdrawn the study.

Over time, there has been a debate, not least in Denmark, about prejudiced researchers with their own agenda in the field of immigration.

“In reality, it is a kind of tragedy that it has ended as it has ended. Namely, that no sensible people could dream of trusting what comes from an entire field of research. But it will of course be the result when the research community can go through a period of about 40 years that does not have a clear and practical analysis and analyzes of immigration from the Middle East and its consequences », it was called from Member of Parliament Henrik Dahl (Liberal Alliance) earlier this year.

He points out that it is a lie when scholars claim that Islam does not play a negative role in freedom of expression, that it is a lie that the culture of the MENA countries does not matter for the rejection of assimilation in the West – and that it is a lie that this is Western Europeans’ fault. Because regardless of the policy in different countries, the problems are largely the same. “The constant factors in the equation, one should be blind not to notice,” Dahl states.

He could see that there is the only difference between the countries where I have a degree that has listened to the researchers. In Sweden, he says, there is an unfortunate tendency to take activist researchers seriously, in Denmark they are more skeptical. And then one can add; in Norway, we are unfortunately closer to Sweden than Denmark in this matter.

Dahl and other skeptics of these research communities have been criticized for what many believe is possible to attribute to migration research, but the question is whether they themselves are not clearer to spread so many mistrust well themselves.

Perception of ethnic profiling

The last example is signed by Professor Mikkel Jarle Christensen and Associate Professor Christian Klement at the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen. The research article «Explaining Divergent Outcomes of Interactions between the Danish Police and Different Ethnic Groups», which is also subject to peer review (peer reviews), can help you document different policies for different people with an immigrant background.

Ethnic minorities are more often charged without leading to punishment, claimed research, and more than suggested police problems with ethnic profiling. Precisely the debate about the police’s so-called ethnic profiling, or racial profiling as some call it, we also have in Norway, which was recently known as the red-green city council in Oslo will introduce a test project with a receipt scheme. City Councilor Raymond Johansen (Labor Party) mean at “It is a big problem that young people with a minority background are stopped by the police and that there is no legitimate reason for this to happen.”

But what city councilor Johansen is doing is “thinking”. The police have denied that they stop people for no reason, but here it is not the police who pull the longest straw. For then challenge some with immigrant backgrounds claim it is candy, then it is they who become the witness of the truth. The Police Association believes it is the wrong way to go with such a receipt scheme, as it may lead to the police being prevented from performing their duties.

What starting point Christensen and Klement had for their research is unknown, but there are many indications that they also “saw” a little too much and thus fell into their own trap.

Withdrawn

The researchers’ conclusion about the differential treatment aroused great interest in Denmark, not least in «the reddest media». The newspaper Politiken wrote a number of articles in which, among other things, they confronted the police and got the Minister of Justice on the field. Although the police have some different forms of discrimination and the Minister of Justice groped, the media undertook that there was a lot that needed to be cleaned up.

And that was it, just that it was in the research project itself.

In a press release 7 October from the Faculty of Law stated that «the researchers withdraw article on police encounters with ethnic minorities». By then, they had been made a stork, not sure by whom, that they had made a solid blunder from the start of the project.

Hers says professors and the associate professor have used data on numbers addresses and not charges. But as is well known, not all charges lead to prosecution. Then it becomes somewhat strange to raise that people with an immigrant background are more often charged without it leading to punishment. That is, what is interpreted as unfounded charges by the police.

“Our focus on charges and police control in the article and in the media has therefore been misleading and cannot be substantiated by our data. The article has therefore been withdrawn », as Christensen and Klement, who could not explain how the error had arisen.

Knowledge and experience

It may be that the explanation is that they to the researchers had a hypothesis that the police are engaged in such different treatment and that they thus looked blindly at the data.

At the same time, it says something about how far away from reality one can afford to be, as anyone with a little knowledge of crime statistics knows that people with an immigrant background are strongly overrepresented. In any case, researchers in Denmark should know that, as Danish Statistics (DST) provides crime figures as annually as honestly.

In 2020, for example, it was stated that descendants of non-Western immigrants are more criminal than the parent generation, and that they are significantly more criminal than ethnic Danish men. If you put the entire human population from 15 to 79 years in Denmark to index 100 and adjusted for socio-economic factors such as status and age, male descendants from non-western countries and crime index had 237, ethnic Danish men were at 95.

If the researchers do not know this, then it does not make politics that I can tell anything about their «legitimate reason» for how they work in the field. But do politicians and scientists think they know better?