The number of hate crimes reported to police rose by one fifth last year. In total, the police registered 1,026 reports of suspected hate crimes, according to the annual hate-crime report by the Police University College.
However, that number still falls below the record number of reports in 2015, when the police registered a total of 1,250 reports of hate crimes.
More than half of last year's hate crime reports involved verbal insults, threats or harassment. The number of cases of this type increased by a third from the previous year. The second most common were cases of suspected assault.
Offences related to disability doubled
In particular, there was an increase in the number of hate crime reports related to victims' sexual orientation, gender identity or expression of gender. There were 126 such reports, leaping by 85 percent from 2020. About one third of these suspected offences involved defamation.
The biggest spike was in reports relating to the victim’s disability, which doubled in comparison with 2020 to 61. Nearly half of these cases centred on defamation.
The number of hate crime reports relating to religion or belief totalled 133, which also represented a year-on-year increase. One third of these cases were illegal threats, with the largest number of cases targeting Muslims.
As in previous years, most of the reports of hate crime in 2021 involved elements targeted at the victim’s ethnic or national origin. Police recorded 706 such cases, slightly more than a year before. In these cases, the most common type of crime was assault.
In 14 percent of reports linked to ethnic or national origin, those targeted were of Roma origin, a significant increase from 2020. Among foreign citizens living in Finland, Somali citizens fell victim to suspected hate crimes most often in relative terms.
The relative proportions of the various hate motives have remained more or less the same since the 2008 survey.
Highest number of hate crimes in Helsinki
The highest number of cases reported to police was in Helsinki, where a quarter of all suspected hate crimes were recorded. The next-highest numbers were in its neighbouring cities of Vantaa and Espoo as well as the two other largest southern cities, Tampere and Turku.
Per capita, though, the highest rates of hate crime reports were in the South Savo town of Pertunmaa and in the northern Uusimaa municipality of Mäntsälä, which both had higher rates than the capital.
Finnish police have tracked hate-crime statistics since 1998.