By Via the Marmot’s Hole comes this news that the foreigner crime wave often reported in the Korean English language media is mostly hype:
An often-heard gripe in South Korea’s expat community is that South Korean media pay outsized attention to crimes by foreigners, especially those by English-language teachers in schools and hagwons (after-school tutor centers).
While there’s been no study done about news-media reporting habits and bias, the Justice Ministry has released data that shows foreigners are charged with fewer crimes on average than South Koreans.
In 2010, the data shows, police around the country charged 1.8 million South Koreans with crimes, about 3.8% of the overall population of 48 million. By contrast, 33,586 non-Koreans were charged with crimes, about 2.7% of the country’s foreign population of 1.26 million.
The biggest foreigner group, the approximately 610,000 Chinese people in South Korea, fell right on that average, with a 2.7% crime rate.
The second-biggest group, the 127,000 Americans in the country, had a crime rate of 1.6%. [Wall Street Journal]
You can read more at the link but the group of foreigners with the highest crime rate is Mongolians for whatever reason. Also of interest is that Canadians have a higher crime rate than Americans. Before people start perpetuating the stereotype of dope smoking Canadian English teachers, most of their crimes are from traffic violations. The bottom line on all of this though is that just like with GI crime, foreigner crime appears to be lower when compared to the average Korean population. However, I would like to see these numbers broken down by violent crimes like I do with my GI crime numbers to draw a firmer conclusion.
12:52 am on August 24th, 2011 1
The word “foreigner” has many different definitions in Korea. Most Koreans think of “foreigners” as white Americans, but, in reality, most “foreigners” in Korea come from other Asian countries.
3:43 am on August 24th, 2011 2
It never mentions the fact that it counts children and elderly which commit little crime which favors the Korean percentage.
7:31 am on August 24th, 2011 3
Get used to it people, you are foreigners so will receive more attention from the koreans than the usual.
For koreans it doesn’t matter if foreigners commit more or less crime than koreans, but that they are actually committing crime in their country …
4:12 pm on August 25th, 2011 4
Foreigners will commit fewer crimes than the locals because Immigration does a good job of screening immigrants, regardless of what local politicians and the local media will have you believe.
3:53 am on August 26th, 2011 5
Son Hyungmin, who played Random Task in “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” has been found guilty of torture in the 1990 rape of an Orange County, California woman. KTLA has the story.
6:20 pm on September 9th, 2011 6
If kushibo had paid attention to ROKdrop, he’d have known about Son Hyungmin two weeks ago, from Glans 5 of this thread. But he didn’t, so he’s only finding out now.
8:24 pm on September 9th, 2011 7
Results will be a bit different if there were 50 million foreigners and 50 million Koreans in the peninsula.