Finland’s first racially motivated murder?
For all we know this could be Finland’s first racially motivated murder being overlooked as such for the simple lack of will to investigate it from that perspective, writes Jonathan Hadley.
It was described as a ‘spur of the moment’ shooting of ‘two foreign men’ by a Finnish man at a pizzeria in Oulu on the night of Saturday 18 February. The following day’s Yle News was quick to report that police had already “ruled out racism as the motive”. Curiously, though, the brief news report proceeded to quote Chief Inspector Risto Viippola of Oulu Police as saying “We cannot say what the motive was”. The local online news source ’65 Degrees North’ was also quoting a ‘police spokesman’ on Sunday as saying “In this case, I wouldn’t think that racism is a motive.” The gunman and one of his victims are dead. Another was left in a serious, but stable condition. And the pizzeria owner, also reported as being of immigrant background, fled the scene after being shot at by the gunman. There appeared to be no other direct witnesses.
I doubt the police spokesman and Chief Inspector Viippola are one and the same. I might be wrong in the Finnish case, but in UK police-media terms, the often quoted ‘police spokesman’ is usually an officer at the scene who is happy to give his opinion when approached by a journalist, but not his name and is rarely the official or informed police spokesman for the incident in question. Yet I was still left wondering how, given that neither victims nor perpetrator had as then been spoken to, could one possible motive be so readily ‘ruled out’ in the absence of any evidence of any motive at all at that stage? On the face of it, it remained a distinct possibility. What motivates the immediate ‘ruling out’ of racism (and racism in particular) as a motive when so-called ‘foreigners’ or ‘people of immigrant background’ are victims of violent crime, without any apparent basis for its elimination? It seemed premature to be ruling anything out at all. For all we know this could be Finland’s first racially motivated murder being overlooked as such for the simple lack of will to investigate it from that perspective.
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