Below are excerpts from an intermittent conversation between Vlad and me on Skype. It began early last week and went on for several days. I’ve edited out extraneous material on unrelated topics:

In most European countries, it is customary to omit the full surname of the perpetrator in news stories about crime. Unfortunately for the politically correct, it doesn’t help to list the malefactors as Ahmed K. or Mohammed A., or occasionally Ndebele Z. Everybody can tell the level of cultural enrichment in those criminals.

In Sweden it used to be the practice (I don’t know if it still is) to embeige the news photos of perpetrators in the process of pixilating them, to reduce the melanin factor. Ten or fifteen years ago the process was known as “pinkwashing”, but as I understand it, that neologism has since been co-opted by the LGBTQI+ community to designate the institutional practice of pretending to support sexual deviants for political advantage.

In the USA we normally see the full name of the accused perpetrator in news reports on crime. Sometimes a mug shot is included, sometimes not. As Vlad pointed out, when the perpetrator is a Muslim, the name is withheld for as long as possible. Often the same reticence is applied if the criminal is named Tyrone or Tamika, because you might as well post the mug shot if you’re going to list those names.

There’s no punch line to this story — these are just idle ruminations on the ethnicity of criminals.

In my line of work I have to look at a huge number of depressing news stories about horribly violent and depraved crimes — dozens or even hundreds of them every day. I don’t keep any statistics on ethnicity, but seeing the cavalcade of perps parade past gives a sense of the ethnic distribution of criminal behavior.

In the USA, for whatever reason, the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by blacks or Latinos — far in excess of their proportional numbers in the population.

In Europe, on the other hand, criminals are most likely to be Muslims from the Middle East, North Africa, or South Asia, or blacks from sub-Saharan Africa. Gypsies, too, are well-represented, but often identified as “Romanians”. Albanians (and Kosovars) also figure prominently.

Interestingly enough, extreme violence in Canada often seems to be committed by Indians (teepee, not red dot), especially where alcohol is a contributing factor.