Tgk1946's Blog

Hello Trevor,

Your comment on ‘For gangs with a social media presence like Apex, there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ has been removed.

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3. It might have been removed for another editorial reason, for example to avoid repetition or keep the conversation on topic.

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For your reference, the removed comment was:

From Police should collect and publish crime statistics based on race Are African gangs responsible for some of the most violent crimes? Or is it a media beat up? We don’t know, because the police only collect country of birth data for charged offenders. What about all of the others yet to be charged, people who are stopped, questioned, or interviewed by police? A Deputy Commissioner recently explained the decision not to racially profile by saying, “… people think it would create more community harm by asking the question of ethnicity”.
It beggars belief that we are now so politically correct we are worrying about how suspects feel answering factual based questions. The police should be collecting demographic data, including information on ethnicity, and they should publish it. Having accurate information is the best way for our authorities to identify if particular groups are committing certain crimes, and to develop the policy solutions to stop them.

Racial (or ethnic) “profiling” is an integral part of official descriptions in USA, UK, (probably) many other non-Anglo countries, as it was (is?) in RSA. So, it would be deemed “unhelpful”, if not illegal, if police reports in those places failed to tag the suspects with a racial descriptor.

Whether or not racial tags are used by the Apex mob to big them up is another matter. But, police are using the African appearance tag in the last week or two. I guess they can’t use “black”, as that would cause confusion with other ethnic types (in Australia).

Maybe, Mark, many may say that you are being unhelpful to the suffering public by failing to point out the obvious re the ethnicities of Apex gang members. Anyway, you have opened the batting on a contentious subject. Let’s see if the contributions feed into your thesis.

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Kind regards,

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