Japanese Police Report Warns of Foreign Crime

If you actually look at the crime white papers, you will see crimes broken down by reported incident, arrest, sentence, etc. all of the information that you claim is being made up is available in the same form that it is in other countries. The Japanese police are obviously only able to keep statistics for how many foreigners have committed crimes that have been solved. If they started attributing unsolved crimes to foreigners in official statistics, then we would have a problem. They are not doing this, however.

“Wonder if they get extra quota points for arresting a gaijin… Nah, I don’t really wonder, I just assume it’s true.”

“When reported crime rates don’t fit the narrative. J cops and the media just make stuff up.”

Now who is making stuff up to fit a narrative?

This is what I mean by “head in the sand” – it couldn’t possibly be that there is a serious amount of crime by foreigners in some areas; the Japanese police, media, etc. must be making it all up. This is one of the reasons why foreign resident groups and activists, outside of Zainichi groups, have zero ability to talk to Japanese officialdom. If you resort to conspiracy theory and name calling rather than considering solutions, you only end up adding to the problem.

Asides from a very vocal and (Thank God) marginalized shrill minority here, I really doubt most people coming to Japan to work or to visit are going to give a crap about Japanese crime statistics.

But then again, Debitards and the JT crowd think they’re represent the breadth of the Japanese foreigner community.

Mart, is Heisei 14 the last time they recorded the nationality of the victims as well as the perpetrators?

Long ago I started looking at the official NPA breakdowns of perpetrators by nationality; here’s one for Heisei 15 (2003):

http://www.npa.go.jp/toukei/keiji12/h15.12-hp.pdf

The numbers show (pages 37 and 38 in particular) that Chinese people — sorry, Chinese folks reading this — are the biggest offenders. Crimes by Western Europe and the Anglosphere, and Africa too, are very low, So you can see why people get angry about the typical big-nosed Westerner used in the anti-foreign-crime leaflets. People who look like that — and as unfair as it might be to use looks as a basis, that’s what beat cops use when stopping people on the streets — simply don’t commit enough crimes to be in the cops’ sights!

When you say that thefts are committed by foreigners more often than their population would indicate, what are you using as a base for population? Residents, or residents plus visitors, or some combination? I often see visitors left out of the population entirely. This person (report in English) tries to correct for that fact, but counts all visitors as if they were in Japan all year:

http://www.wa-pedia.com/gaijin/foreign_crime_in_japan.shtml

A more accurate number would be to divide the number of visitors by the average length of stay in the country, so the denominator for the USA, to take one example, would be not 48,000 (the number of American in Japan) or 752,000 (48k residents plus 704k visitors), but, if the average stay of a non resident is (I’m guessing) one month, 48k + (704k/12) = about 107,000.

As for crime trends up to 2004 and then since 2004: Here’s some material from an NPA report from Heisei 19 (2007):

http://www.npa.go.jp/hakusyo/h19/honbun/html/j2310000.html

The number of people arrested went up quote a bit from Heisei 9 to the peak in 17 — 14,000 incidents to over 21,000, though the foreign population increased significantly over this period.

Then since 2004 the crime rate has gone down quite a bit:

http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0723/TKY201007230364.html

You’d think the NPA would trumpet this as an improvement in society, but instead they start using weasel words like “…to omowaremasu” (“it is believed that…”), and continue to compare today’s totals to the lower rates of around 1990. This means that they can keep portraying foreign crime as “increasing” until it drops below the 1990 rate (when there were many fewer foreign people in Japan). I’d like to see a bit more focus on the last six years rather than the 1990-2004 period, which becomes less relevant with each passing year.