Mathematical crime denial at the New York Times

The Times article begins by claiming that the German public was not really “interested” in the crime until an Afghan refugee was caught. In other words, only race, and not rape and murder, had outraged the public. On what basis do they make this judgment? Because public broadcaster ARD, “originally judged [that the crime] did not meet the threshold for national news.” Following this logic, the public would have been correct in its outrage over the brutal violation and murder of a 19-year old only if the social arbiters of ARD (the German equivalent of NPR) had deemed the crime significant. And of course ARD didn’t originally view the crime as significant. In Germany, as in the United States, publicly supported broadcasters view crime not as a problem created by criminals (especially minority criminals) but as a problem of insensitivity on the part of citizens who stubbornly refuse to view criminals (especially minority criminals) as the real victims. The one exception to this rule is so-called hate crimes, and had the victim been an Afghan immigrant and the crime headscarf-tugging rather than plain old murder/rape of a non-immigrant female, ARD would doubtlessly have immediately deemed it a matter of national significance. As it was, however, ARD was eventually dragged into reporting the crime because the public stubbornly insisted that it did, in fact, matter. Thus — according to the Times — poor public media itself become a sort of collateral victim of the public’s insensitivity to immigrant rapist-murderers:

ARD’s earlier decision not to report on the crime set off further anger and accusations that the country’s “liberal media elite” were intent on protecting migrants, going so far as to underreport or even cover up their crimes.

Where, one might ask, did Times reporter Melissa Eddy get her magical ability to measure and interpret public “anger”? She used Google:

Typing the German words “are migrants” into Google’s search engine in Germany completes the phrase with “more criminal than Germans” on its second suggestion.

And that’s it. Never mind the mass New Year’s Eve assaults, the attacks on children and women in public pools and transit stations, the need to distribute comic books to immigrants to teach them that women are allowed to walk down a public street unmolested: a Google search reveals that some faceless mass of people are committing the ultimate sin of asking questions about crime and safety. Following her unassailable Google search argument, Ms. Eddy turns to the clincher: she reports in the same paragraph that the government (the same government that let in a million mostly young male immigrants) released statistics last year about “migrant criminality” in order to “calm [the] heated debate.” Here is her sleazy confabulation of the government’s own sleazy confabulation of crime stats:

Less than 10 percent of Germany’s population of 81 million people is foreign born. Of the roughly two million people investigated for all crimes, just 6 percent were migrants. Of 2,721 crimes that ended in a death, migrants were responsible for 233, or about 9 percent. And of 1,683 cases of sexual abuse, including rape, migrants were responsible for about 5 percent.

According to the German government, Ms. Eddy, and the Times, recent immigrants are under-represented as perpetrators of murder and rape. “[N]ot a particularly damning portrait,” Ms. Eddy sneers. But there are more than a few flies in this snake oil. The 6 percent statistic she cites counts all foreign-born residents of Germany, not the million or so recent immigrants admitted by Merkel against the public’s wishes. It is no measure of the crime rate of that population – though it is presented as one. Regarding sexual assault, the 5 percent number not only suffers from the statistical ‘foreign-born versus recent immigrant’ problem: it is also fails to account for the sex of the immigrants in question. Nobody is arguing that immigrant women are wandering the streets grabbing the genitals of men. Up goes that pesky “damning” quotient. Since when did journalists accept official statistics regarding sexual assault, anyway? The German government has more than dragged its heels when responding to sexual assaults by immigrants: why doesn’t this matter to Ms. Eddy, who previously reported that the vast majority of sexual assaults perpetrated in the New Year’s Eve attacks had not resulted in the apprehension of anyone because of the utter chaos and mass nature of the attacks:

The police have so far been unable to apprehend anyone, a fact that Wolfgang Albers, Cologne’s chief of police, attributed to the chaos in which the assaults took place, despite there being dozens of officers on duty in the area. “The women were in a very difficult situation,” Chief Albers said in an interview Wednesday with the public radio station WDR 5. “They were afraid, they wanted to get away, and of course they did not notice any specific faces.”

German government’s dirty efforts to paper over serious crimes committed by immigrants

Rather than dismissing any sex assaults as “not particularly damning,” Ms. Eddy might check something other than Google and answer these questions: were the New Year’s Eve assaults even counted in the government’s statistical snow job? Were any assaults where no offender was apprehended counted? Were police reports even processed for all, or even some of the Cologne New Year’s attacks? In fact, how would the government count assaults by immigrants in cases where nobody was caught and prosecuted for the crime? Given the anonymous nature of random street attacks, shouldn’t the Times have reported that the statistics being shilled by the German government do not include attacks where an offender is not caught, prosecuted, and convicted? And, perhaps barring murder, does this not describe the vast majority of such crimes? Such trivia is not noted. In the age of the hate crime, when even verbal slights (or claims of verbal slights) against protected groups make headlines and trigger full-bore police investigations, counting rapes against the commoners – let alone intimidation, harassment, or verbal slights committed against mere women by said protected groups — is of no matter to the authorities, or the reporters who dumbly ape their denial-laced propaganda for them. It is reprehensible, and also fake news, for the Times to permit its reporter to offer such an intentionally incurious rendering of the German government’s dirty efforts to paper over serious crimes committed by immigrants. And ethically, selectively denying crime this way is prejudice, no matter how loudly Ms. Eddy and her editors insist that the prejudice runs the other way. Ms. Eddy and her overseers are no better than any other low-rent lynch mob.