Following the murder of a student at a high school party in Roskilde, the Danish Prime Minister opens the door to declaring the ethnicity or country of origin of the accused.
According to DR, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has opened the door to discussing the possibility of police announcing the ethnicity of people suspected of committing crimes, following the stabbing death of a 16-year-old high school student during a high school party in Roskilde shortly before the start of the current school year.
Frederiksen responded affirmatively when asked, during a summer meeting of the Social Democratic Party, whether the public deserved to know the race of suspects in criminal cases.
How does the police currently deal with the issue of origin and race?
Currently, Danish police disclose the nationality of perpetrators of crimes as a general rule, while ethnicity is considered sensitive personal information under data protection rules. This means that if a suspect is a Danish citizen of Middle Eastern origin, for example, the police consider him Danish according to his official nationality without disclosing his country of origin.
Last year, when the police decided to start disclosing the nationality of suspects in some cases, they explained that there is a difference between nationality and race from a legal standpoint.
René Gyldensten, communications director for the Danish National Police, said that nationality can, as a general rule, always be declared, while information about a person's race may only be provided if there are special professional reasons that justify it, such as cases in which the police are looking for a particular person.
Frederiksen wants to research changing the rules
But Mette Frederiksen has now opened the door to examining whether it is possible to expand the scope of information that the police release.
According to DR, she said the question is whether more can be done in this area, and that she is prepared to consider it as part of the debate that Danes should have about the identity of the people who commit crimes in the country.
Frederiksen added that she did not see a need to avoid this discussion, saying that there was clearly an overrepresentation of young men with roots in the Middle East, as well as in some parts of Africa, and that these people were committing a very large number of crimes in Europe and Denmark.
There is currently no decision requiring police to disclose race
Despite the Prime Minister's statements, there is still no draft legislation ready or a resolution that would require the police to disclose the ethnicity of suspects in criminal cases.
Bjørn Brandenborg, a member of the Social Democratic Party and the party's legal rapporteur, had proposed more than a year ago that the police be required to publish information about race, but there has been no change on this front since then.
When Frederiksen was asked whether her government or party intended to require police to disclose the ethnicity of suspects, she said that this had not been discussed within the party, and that she did not know if it would be appropriate in all cases.
At the same time, she stressed that she does not see a problem with the emergence of information about race, considering that this information represents part of the picture that citizens must deal with and understand.
The son of a former minister and head of the parliamentary bloc was at the ceremony.
The case became more complicated for Mattias Tesfaye, the former minister and head of the Social Democratic Party's parliamentary group, as his 16-year-old son was at the same party where the stabbing incident took place in Roskilde.
Tsfaye said his son was able to quickly access information about the stabbing incident and the suspect through social media, including Snapchat, information that was not necessarily available to his parents in the same way.
Tsvaeh argued that part of the debate surrounding the issue involved a degree of unhelpful argument, because many young people have access to information that he and his wife cannot access when they go to the DR website, for example.
Tsvayh refuses to reduce the incident to a matter of drinking culture.
Matthias Zweij said that this reality makes it necessary to discuss what these tragic attacks mean and what they say about society.
He noted that one of the things that angered him was that some people talked about the incident as a result of a problem in alcohol-drinking culture, or as a result of consuming too many bottles of beer at high school parties, and Tsvae stressed that in his opinion this was not the core of the problem.
Police have not released the suspect's ethnicity.
In the case concerning the murder of the 16-year-old student in Roskilde, the police did not disclose the race of the person accused in the case.
In contrast, rumors and unconfirmed information about the crime and the person suspected of committing it spread through social media.
Mette Frederiksen's comments come in this context, at a time when the question is being raised again about the boundaries between the public's right to access information about crimes and the rules for protecting personal data, and whether the information that the Danish police can disclose in criminal cases should be expanded.
