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3.1.2.2 Concerns of Supranational Bodies and NGOs
In addition to the limited informative value provided by official data and statistics, some of our interview partners experience major problems with the way police register crimes and how victims of hate crimes are treated. These interviews suggest that many police officers either do not have any knowledge of what hate crime are or are completely uninformed about far-right organizations and their activities. Officers are often not very helpful, sometimes even to the point of showing hostility towards minority groups (see Chapter 4). According to an ECRI assessment, racist and other bias motives of a crime are generally ignored by the Polish police and other law enforcement agencies, and as a result, the offenses are treated as any other crime. »One of the reasons given for this [by the Polish authorities] is that the police are reluctant to take the racist motive into account as they consider they should be blind to a person’s race.« (12) Interviews with NGOs below will highlight that when Polish law enforcement minimizes or ignores bias motivation in violent crimes, it not only makes it difficult to estimate the number of incidents in Poland, but it also discourages minority and other disadvantaged groups from pursuing justice. In an interview for this study, a representative of the Russian Cultural and Educational Association in Bialystok (Rosyjskie Stowarzyszenie Kulturalno Oświatowe w Polsce, RSKO) also highlighted police officers’ reluctance to recognize the racist or neo-Fascist background of crimes. The association has come to the conclusion that the authorities do not want to admit the scale of the problem. In such situations, organizations or individuals attempting to intervene are left with the task of investigating and providing the needed evidence:
»Collecting information is a necessity; it proves that violent attacks are not a rare phenomenon, as claimed by the police officers. […] It is convenient for the police to show once or twice a year that it was a sub-culture or simply to categorize such crimes as »hooliganism« and not treat them seriously. It is necessary to prove that such cases cannot be simply considered hooliganism, but rather that they have an ethnic, racial or religious bias. In the Polish reality, this is almost impossible.«(13)
Another NGO spokesperson, representing the Union of Jewish Religious Communities (Zwiazek Gmin Wyznaniowych Zydowskich w RP) in the Republic of Poland, mentioned similar difficulties in the context of anti-Semitism:
»Unfortunately there were many cases of anti-Semitism that were not considered as such by the police. Thus, for example, there was a case when a person who was Jewish was attacked, but it was impossible for the family to prove that it was anti-Semitism that motivated the perpetrators to commit the crime.«(14)
Even in very obvious cases, e.g. Nazi-skinhead violence against African people accompanied by racial slurs, the police have reportedly been reluctant to record and investigate the racist motivation behind the attack. In November 2006 following several anti-Semitic and anti-gay incidents in Warsaw and Wroclaw, the local non-governmental organization Open Republic Association against Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia (»Otwarta Rzeczpospolita« Stowarzyszenie Przeciw Antysemityzmowi i Ksenofobii) appealed to the Ministry of Interior to provide clearer guidelines to police on how to respond to these types of complaints. The NGO accused the police of being inattentive and helpless in reacting to societal abuse and harassment. (15)
Since homophobic attacks are not defined by the Polish Criminal Code as hate crimes, they are not portrayed in the police statistics either. As one member of the Polish Campaign Against Homophobia (Kampania Przeciw Homofobii) explains, the registration system and how the police handle the cases do not encourage reporting and are flawed in many respects:
»For example, an incident of a racially motivated rape will be put in the rape statistics and not in the statistics of racial violence. Often the victims of violence, while talking with the police, hide that the reason of the attack was their sexual orientation. For example, when somebody is attacked or robbed, she or he will not say that it happened in a gay club, because she or he will be ashamed of this. I got a letter from Gdańsk that in a gay club, people who were actually heterosexual and only looked homosexual were attacked. The motive was that [the offenders believed] they were dykes. They [the assault victims] wrote that they do not want to report it to the police and want to forget it«(16)
Moreover, the police do not keep records on ideologically motivated violence targeting other victim groups that the perpetrators consider to be »anti-national,« such as anti-Fascist activists or alternative youth. Information on criminal cases is not even published regularly in a publicly accessible form when the cases are directly relevant to the issue of racist or anti-Semitic hate crimes based on the Criminal Code provisions. Institutions such as the Ministry of Justice or the Police Headquarters Office only occasionally collect and reveal this information, mostly upon special requests by other official bodies or journalists.
As a result of such an inquiry, the daily newspaper POLSKA The Times was recently able to obtain some more current police statistics on far-right activities/offenses according to which there were 82 »Nazi incidents« in 2007, 35 more than recorded for the previous year. In 2005 there were only 18 registered incidents. In addition, the newspaper reported about six cases of right-wing violence handled by the Agency for Internal Security (Agencja Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego, ABW) for the period 2006-2007. (17) Consistent with their previous record, the agency refused to provide any details to journalists.
Like other post-Communist countries, the question of police legitimacy is another decisive issue within Polish society that undermines the efforts of many marginalized groups to access basic civil rights. Law enforcement agencies are still regarded by many with deep suspicion and as a remnant of a repressive past when the police were servants of the state and the Communist Party. At the same time, experiences of regular police abuse, reported by members of the Roma community or other ethnic or sexual minority groups, do not help to strengthen these groups’ confidence in police officers taking incidents of individual assaults seriously. Despite Amnesty International repeatedly urging the Polish authorities to intensify efforts to significantly reduce cases of police brutality through training, effective investigation and prosecution of those responsible (see Chapter 1), NGO representatives and activists still observe that most victims of hate crimes do not report incidents and assaults to police departments, leaving many unregistered and offenders unpunished.
12. European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) 2005. Third Report on Poland, CRI (2005) 25, Strasbourg, p. 10.
13. Interview with the Russian Cultural and Educational Association.
14. Interview with the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in the Republic of Poland.
15. US Department of State 2007. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Poland 2006, Washington D.C., p. 3.
16. Interview with Campaign Against Homophobia.
17. POLSKA The Times, 21 Apr 2008.
(OPP)
