Contrary to popular stereotype, the crime rate in Roma communities is significantly lower than the average in Ukraine. This was stated on July 31 during a roundtable at the Office of the Ombudsman, by the expert Oleg Martinenko who commented on the results of the study "Monitoring of observance of Roma rights in the activities of law enforcement agenies." The research was conducted by the experts and representatives of NGOs supported by the International Foundation "Renaissance."
"The stereotypical perception of Roma as an asocial group has long existed in the minds of most ordinary citizens. But let’s operate on facts and official statistics. For example, let’s compare the number of crimes committed by Roma with the overall figure for Ukraine. The analysis of this comparison in Transcarpathian, Odesa, Poltava and Cherkasy regions, where there are many Roma communities, demonstrated that the rate of criminal activity among Roma is 2.5 times lower than the overall crime rate in Ukraine", – Oleg Martinenko said.
During the study, they also analyzed the texts of judgments (in terms of specifying ethnicity of defendants), and state statistics.
The results of the analysis was commented by Nataliya Kozarenko, the Regional Coordinator for Public Relations of the Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights: "Only in the materials on criminal cases of the Unified State Register of Court Decisions, that has been maintained since 2006, the word "Gypsy" is mentioned in 1066 sentences. The analysis of the text of the sentences showed that the nationality "Roma", "Gypsy" is mentioned five times more often than, for example, the nationality "Ukrainian". And never the mention of nationality was caused by objective reasons."
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