Via the Moscow Times:
Moscow's police chief questioned on Wednesday whether civil liberties are even practical when authorities need to keep law and order and blamed non-Muscovites for up to 70 percent of all crimes committed in the city.
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On Wednesday, Kolokoltsev said he would create a police department to combat “ethnic crime,” and he asked whether Russians' freedom of movement around the country was partly to blame for the violence.
"All these problems are more difficult to solve compared with a time when a much tougher registration system was in place," he said. "We really need to have a look at how far our liberal democratic principles correspond to the demands and desires of the city population."
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On a related issue, Kolokoltsev said the number of crimes registered by Moscow police this year fell by 12 percent, with non-Muscovites to blame for at least a half of them, Interfax reported.
Russian and foreign migrants were perpetrators in 49 percent of solved crimes, and the figure may stand at 70 percent if unsolved crimes are also included, Kolokoltsev said.
He said he would not provide statistics for non-Muscovite criminals based on ethnicity, warning about the danger of fueling nationalist hatred. But then he specified that a “huge percentage” of rapes were committed by Central Asian natives.(source)
