Does Switzerland have a problem with foreign criminals?

There will be a voting on the 28.11.2010 concerning the "Deportation Initiative" wich was introduced by the Swiss Folks Party (SVP).

Which is best known for their controversal posters like this:

("Sicherheit schaffen" means "create safety")


For that reason politicians are debating each other almost every day in various TV-Shows, newspapers and other media. Strangely enough integration and crime caused by foreigners are the main topics on german TV too, whereby it's almost impossible to dodge these topics.
As a cosmopolitian, knowledge seeking person, I didn't feel like watching "Families In Fire Point" (a german serial about families with problems, most of the time unemployed families) or Call-in-Shows (Prize competitions where they pretend that you can win a lot of money, but where they pick 1 out of thousands.. and they got tons of them on german TV)  so one night I ended up watching a discussion concerning the topic "Integration And Crime Caused By Foreigners".
In the course of the discussion someone brought up the argument that the crime rate of Germans is almost the same like the one of people with an immigrant background. And the only difference is that  there are laws which Germans can't offend that easy, but nobody ever mentions that.

So I asked myself "How is that here in Switzerland?"

With this argument (from the show)  in the back of my mind  I started searching for crime statistics on the internet and found one on the website of the Federal Office For Statistics.
(http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/news/publikationen.Document.129574.pdf)

While studying the annual report 2009 of the police crime statistics I found this graphic on the page 23:

For reasons of clarity and comprehensibility I colored the illustration, but the information is the same as in the file I mentioned above.

A quick explanation for the diagram:

StGB = criminal code
BetmG = narcotics act
AuG = aliens act
CH = swiss citizens
A. Wohnb. = foreign citizens (pass B, C und Ci)
A. Asyl = asylum seekers (pass F, N und S)
A. Übrige = other foreigners

As you can see in the diagram above the reportings of an offense of swiss citizens are higher then those of all the foreign citizens together, except of the aliens act.

In addition in the annual report is also mentioned that swiss citizens can't violate against the aliens act that easy, unless they are involved in illegal employment of foreigners or faciliate illiegal stay of foreigners.
Which was also one of the arguments on the german TV-Show.

So the next question I asked myself was: "Why no one ever mentioned this on the mainstream meadia?"

To answer this question we got to understand what media company and a media corporation are.

 Quotation from the german Wikipedia:
"Media companies are companies which conduct journalistic media or produce for them. They create social connections and are therefore different from companies in other industries and have own "media rights". They have a big influence on trends and the opinion of the public. Because of their real or assumed power of interpratation, specialy the big media companies, are in the center of media policy."

Media corporations are mergers of juridical independent companies, which generate their money most of press, radio broadcasting, movies, music and online contents. Some of them dispose of budgets in the amount of nation states. The five media corporations with the highest turnover of the world are in US propertiy. "Time Warner" leads the raking with 33,735 billion € (accounting year 2007). The concerns "The Walt Disney Company", "Comcast News Corporation" and "Viacom" occupe the places two to five. The german, and biggest european media concern "die deutsche Bertelsmann AG" is on the sixt place with a turnover of 18,758 billions € in the year 2007. Media concerns, as motors and moderators of the globalisation, have an economic and opinion-forming power."(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medienunternehmen)

As you can see in the last sentence of this quotation, media concerns have economic and opinion-forming power, which means they can control the population of a country to reach certain goals.
Therefore I leave it up to you to forge your own opinion what they want to reach with suppressing facts and flooding the media with controversal posters. The only thing that I want to point out is that large concerns
have the ability to control way more than we think. I will tell you more about that in an other article...

Matter of fact, if more people would occupy themselfs with more important things than MTV, "Young, Wild & Sexy" (A docusoap about adolscents and their night life) they couldn't be manipulated that easy.