Crime Stats Questioned By Rights Campaigners

By Ali Nassor

Special to The St. Petersburg Times

Published: May 20, 2008 (Issue # 1374)

Human rights activists and members of ethnic minorities have condemned official statistics depicting a drastic fall in the number of hate crimes committed in St. Petersburg as exaggerated and say the decline if anything is cause by the police’s inefficiency in dealing with such attacks.

“About 60 teenagers are currently standing trial on charges of extremism and hate crimes,” Chief of the Investigation Department of the St. Petersburg and Lenoblast Prosecutor’s Office, Andrei Lavrenko told reporters on Thursday.

He said since last year the police has managed to avert dozens of plots of extremism including an explosion in Dom Kino on 12 Karavannaya Ulitsa and a plot to blow up a bus carrying police cadets. He said the suspects were recruits of the same network of racial extremists responsible for an explosion in McDonald’s restaurant on Nevsky Prospekt last year.

St. Petersburg and Lenoblast chief beat cop Vyacheslav Kovalenko also said on Thursday that 218 people — mostly teenagers — were apprehended for hate-related crimes this year compared to 433 for the same period last year.

But according to a report by Galina Kozhevnikova of the Moscow-based Sova Information Analysis Center that monitors the nation’s hate crimes in a quarterly report, 37 hate murders were reported across Russia during the period compared to 26 committed during the same period last year.

However, Vadim Nepryakhin, Prosecutor of the Moskovsky District believes that while St. Petersburg has experienced a decline in hate crimes, his district deserves special credit for not having registered a case of that nature this year.

“Though I don’t rule out hate incidents in other parts of the city, I am proud to announce that our jurisdictional area is an oasis of peace,” he said.

“It has been quite a long time ever since we had a report of a violent hate crime in our district,” he said.

In a meeting with a representative of the St. Petersburg African community on Thursday Nepryakhin distributed a copy of safety instructions for foreign students.

Several incidents of racially motivated attacks had been reported at a student residence on Novoizmailosky Prospekt in Nepryakhin’s jurisdiction.

The meeting with an African representative was one in a series that Nepryakhin has been holding with the leaders of the city’s ethnic minorities this year in his efforts to overcome the problem of intolerance.

Among others, he has met with representatives of the Indian, Chinese, Arab, Afghan and Tajik communities in what he said were measures to establish a bridge between the targets of hate crimes and the law enforcement organs.

The safety guide Nepryakhin handed out contained more than 30 instructions and was similar to one the city’s Prosecutor’s Office issued in November 2004.

The Prosecutor’s Office recommend foreign students to stay near the alarm and the driver when commuting on public transport, avoid transport with few passengers, avoid dark courtyards, run away if threatened, shout loudly to attract public attention when sensing danger and not to invite strangers to their rooms.

As in 2004, the guidelines were met with some scorn by students.

“How can you avoid transport with few passengers and get a place near the driver and the alarm at the same time?,” said Ibrahim Diallo, a student from Guinea.

“In fact, the whole thing ends up by saying that a foreign student should stay indoors if he wants to be safe in St. Petersburg,” he said