Swiss Police Target Innocent Foreigners

Submitted by admin on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 10:26

The Swiss government proudly publishes the statistic that 72% of the prison population are of foreign origin.

Read the official statistic from September 2010 here.

The Swiss authorities removed that page and buried the "72% criminals foreign" on page 3 of another report available in French here and English here.

 

Now, I could not easily find a tidy link to a 2010 census figure including foreigners, but the Guardian did a report showing 21.7% here.

The official Swiss government figures for 2014 (24.3%) are available here.

A quick calculation shows therefore that a foreigner is slightly more than eight times more likely to go to prison in Switzerland than a Swiss national.

Now, ask yourself, is it possible that this is a naturally occurring statistic?

Let's look at the UK. In 2013 the UK population was 12.5% foreign born, according to this report.

According to this report from the University of Sheffild, in 2009 foreign nationals comprised 13.7% of the total UK prison population.

In the UK, the percentage of foreigners in the prison system is roughly equal to the percentage of foreigners in the overall population.

Clearly, this is not an exhaustive study, but it does make the Swiss 72% figure seem extremely troubling.