THE FINNISH RACIST CRIME MONITORING

Eurobarometer and other surveys have found that Finnish people are, on average, more tolerant towards immigrants and minorities than respondents from other EU countries. Also, according to the preliminary results of the EU International Crime Survey, the level of hate crime victimization is low in Finland. One reason for this relatively positive situation is that foreign nationals living in Finland are very small in number. However, the number of foreign population is clearly increasing, and racism has been recognized as a serious so-cial problem. Racist crimes are monitored in Finland mainly through police records. Since 1997, the Ministry of Interior, and since 2003 also The Police College of Finland, has published annual reports on racially motivated crimes. These reports are based on a multi-phased research process in which the content of one year electronic textual data of police reports is analysed to identify all those cases in which the crime is racially motivated. As a result of this process a data matrix is formed which contains background variables of perpetrator