Author Topic: Finnish police have a "secret" racist FB-group.  (Read 1797 times)

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Offline Askold

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Finnish police have a "secret" racist FB-group.
« on: June 03, 2017, 05:21:03 pm »
The reason for the quotation marks is that the group has/had 2800 members and we only have 7800 police officers in the country.

...When 28% of your members are in something it is not really a few rotten apples any more than it can be a "secret" group from the other officers. I mean, us civilians hadn't known about it, but there is no damn way I can accept that the police was unaware of it. But recently one news media got a scoop and has published screencaps from the group.

Marko "Fobba" Forss, one of our most famous police officers (because he was one of the first "net cops" officers who were available on social media sites so that people, specifically teenagers, could approach them for help and they also deal with harassment and other crimes on social media) left the group previously saying "any leaks from this would look really bad."

And what exactly happened there? Mainly racists jokes, illegal profiling of people based on their ethnicity, raging at people who claim that police profiled them, officers openly promoting racism, laughing at videos of police brutality, fake-news and so on.

Link to the article, but it is in Finnish: https://longplay.fi/sidetone/rasismi-rehottaa-poliisien-salaisessa-facebook-ryhmassa

I am really upset about this, we still have one of the most trusted police forces in the world but things like this are a blow to it and now that the police leadership responded by trying to downplay this it is just making it seem worse.

And for the record, a few people had been wondering about the police actions recently. A priest holding a peaceful protest in support of refugees was told to stop or he would be arrested, Neo-Nazis holding a protest opposing refugees is allowed to continue and recently racist protest at a school was helped by the police who gave a ride to the protest leader and help him organize the event...
No matter what happens, no matter what my last words may end up being, I want everyone to claim that they were:
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Aww, you guys rock. :)  I feel the love... and the pitchforks and torches.  Tingly!

Offline Kanzenkankaku

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Re: Finnish police have a "secret" racist FB-group.
« Reply #1 on: June 03, 2017, 09:00:13 pm »
I'd be really interested to read a translation of what these screencaps from the facebook specifically say. Google can't translate images and it isn't that great in general, so I'd lean towards your translation and already posted summary would be more reliable.

Offline SCarpelan

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Re: Finnish police have a "secret" racist FB-group.
« Reply #2 on: June 04, 2017, 09:36:11 am »
I'm not going to bother with literal translations.



Asian immigrants are successful everywhere, Africans nowhere. Genetics and culture. An obvious fact but political correctness so the only explanation is racism. It explains all the adversities in life.

[The previous commenter] is probably exactly correct. But still, it's hard to deny the effect of the institutional racism in for example USA.

I don't bother commenting because you aren't allowed to tell your opinion about these things in this country anymore.


A refugee tries to hang himself in public, the mocking tone of the comments is a bit difficult to translate without putting in more effort that I can be bothered to do.



[op]I wonder if it was about time to stop this clowning around.

Here is a video about the act.

Not looking for attention at all. This is sad overall. (Mr. Bean: Did you lose control a bit? Did you?)

They can't do even that.

That wouldn't have succeeded. The message got through to the anti-racists.



Objections about not being allowed to call people "neekeri" (can be translated to either "negro" or "nigger" depending on context) with all the PC culture. The implication is that they are not even allowed to use properly descriptive language.



The background to this is that they are mocking a rapper who complains in Facebook about his family members getting racially profiled: with no reason two police officers in civilian clothing handcuffed his mother and sister and demanded to see their passports. Uniformed reinforcements arrived and in a thorough search his mother's tablet was [accidentally?] broken and the police deleted a video of the incident from his sister's cellphone. They later found out that they were thought to have stolen the badge of one of the original two policemen. Apparently it was missing and they went after two black women who happened to be near them.

Big ado about nothing, no racism here, he is just crying wolf etc.

How about making all the foreigners wear arm bands to avoid racial profiling? Nobody has tried this anywhere!
- The Germans tried this and failed their conquering attempt which lead to "all the foreigners" coming to Germany.

Edit:

I like how the head of the police academy (yeah, we have only one) reacted. He unequivocally condemned the group in twitter:
Quote
I'm ashamed! Building trust with minorities is challenging and oh how easy it is to break #notoracism [link to the article]

When asked if the academy can do anything:
Quote
training and meeting [members of minorities]. On the other hand training has no effect if the culture in the work place doesn't support the goals of training.
« Last Edit: June 04, 2017, 04:25:30 pm by SCarpelan »

Offline Askold

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Re: Finnish police have a "secret" racist FB-group.
« Reply #3 on: June 05, 2017, 05:50:31 am »
The chief of Finnish police has said that the police have no obligation to monitor "mild" crimes (not sure what the proper term in English is) that other police do when they are not on duty.

One of my buddies pointed out that this means that if an off-duty cop sees another police rape someone they do not have an obligation to interfere there either because the minimum sentence for forcing someone to have sex is the same as it is for inciting hate against an ethnic group (which is what the officers in the FB-group repeatedly did.)

Also, Fobba, whom I mentioned earlier as being a former member (and a moderator) in the FB-group, is the officer in charge of this investigation because he is now the head of Hate crimes unit in Finland...

Which is like putting Trump in charge of investigating Mar a Lago for misdoings. I'm not saying that he personally raped and murdered a 15-year old two years ago there ...but one would prefer an investigator who is not connected to this. (Although, when nearly a third of the police were involved with the group finding an outsider would require asking police from another country investigate this case.)
No matter what happens, no matter what my last words may end up being, I want everyone to claim that they were:
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Aww, you guys rock. :)  I feel the love... and the pitchforks and torches.  Tingly!

Offline SCarpelan

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Re: Finnish police have a "secret" racist FB-group.
« Reply #4 on: June 05, 2017, 12:32:34 pm »
The national police board has handed the material to the state prosecutor who will decide what actions are taken if any.

Quote
A Finnish police spokeswoman told the BBC: "Every Finnish national has freedom of speech, but the police are supposed to behave in their spare time in a way that doesn't make the police look bad."

...

"This matter will be thoroughly investigated," said Interior Minister Paula Risikko. "There must be completely zero tolerance for racism and all writings of this kind," she said.

Heh. Risikko is now trying to pander to the anti-racist sentiment. A while ago she was openly palling around with anti-immigration protesters so you'll have to forgive me if I'm a bit suspicious about how honest her sentiment is.

Offline Askold

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Re: Finnish police have a "secret" racist FB-group.
« Reply #5 on: June 05, 2017, 12:57:42 pm »
Came here to link the same BBC article.
No matter what happens, no matter what my last words may end up being, I want everyone to claim that they were:
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Aww, you guys rock. :)  I feel the love... and the pitchforks and torches.  Tingly!

Offline Kanzenkankaku

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Re: Finnish police have a "secret" racist FB-group.
« Reply #6 on: June 05, 2017, 10:11:29 pm »
"mild" crimes (not sure what the proper term in English is) that other police do when they are not on duty.

Legally in America there are misdemeanors and felonies, misdemeanors are the ones that are more mild and carry lesser sentences. So I'm thinking that one might be the equivalent to the Finnish word? Sounds like a similar concept at least.

Offline SCarpelan

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Re: Finnish police have a "secret" racist FB-group.
« Reply #7 on: June 06, 2017, 03:00:04 pm »
"mild" crimes (not sure what the proper term in English is) that other police do when they are not on duty.

Legally in America there are misdemeanors and felonies, misdemeanors are the ones that are more mild and carry lesser sentences. So I'm thinking that one might be the equivalent to the Finnish word? Sounds like a similar concept at least.
I think misdemeanor is the correct word. In Finnish this is "rike" and a felony is "rikos". The definitions probably differ but the idea is the same.

Marko Forss has resigned as the head of the hate speech investigation squad but there is a new story out (again in Finnish, sorry) about his actions as a moderator in the FB group. There was a case earlier where someone had found a screen capture about a discussion about themselves and reported it to the police as defamation (apparently the screen capture had appeared in a certain far-right propaganda site with known Russian connections). This is what lead to Forss resigning as a moderator but in the message where he announced his resignation he also mentioned that he had received this report.

Discussing confidential information in a FB group is a pretty serious misconduct specially since the suspects in the investigation are also members of the said group. While he didn't disclose the name of the person who had made the report it would be easy for the members to connect the dots and know who the person is.

A pity. Forss did very good work with fighting cyberbullying and correcting unfounded rumors when he was just the official beat cop of social media. It's sad to see the other side of the person.