We stopped at his house, around the corner from mine, to pick up his laptop, and set up shop on my dining room table. My Outlook in-box was jammed and more e-mails were coming in by the minute. We networked our computers and set up a database. In 1977, the differences between towns, cities and municipalities were removed, and we now have a hundred and nine municipalities. This makes things a little easier in a nationwide search, as previously there were between four and five hundred towns that we would have to deal with separately.
We created a method, tried to sort groups with racist beliefs from moderate to extreme, and then members of those groups from moderate to extreme, red flagging any person accused or convicted of committing a race crime. Sweetness passed the time looking over our shoulders, trying to learn police work. He played errand boy, brought us coffee. Kate ignored us so we could work in peace.
Real Finns, despite the anti-immigrant stance of many of its members, was the most moderate of our target groups, and also the hardest to investigate. In the 2008 municipal elections, they took around a hundred fifty thousand votes. Those records are of course sealed. They have their own magazine, published every three weeks. The circulation is twenty-five thousand. There were insufficient grounds to subpoena the list of recipients. The list would have been valuable, as this murder was political, and I could have cross-checked against known racists. They had around five hundred municipal councillors in office, but in fact, only seven or eight people were the true organizers of the movement. Most of them were from the other end of the country, but I could at least have them questioned. Not that I thought that any of them were likely murderers, but their known associates could have been.
I got an e-mail that contained compiled statistics of crimes committed by and against foreigners. It interested me.
Two point five percent of the population is foreign or naturalized.
Foreigners commit nine percent of all crime.
Foreigners commit twenty-seven percent of all rapes.
The majority of crimes by foreigners are committed by Estonians and Russians, not by people of color—blacks, Turks, Gypsies, etc.—who bear the brunt of racial hatred. Turks, for instance, have a near monopoly on the pizza shop industry. Their storefront windows are frequently smashed out.
Race crimes against foreigners were up twenty percent in 2009, and numbered over a thousand.
Race crimes against Swedish-speaking Finns were on the rise. Nationalist Finns were beating up other Finns for speaking their mother tongue.
The organization Finnish Pride ranks high in virulence. The seven-hundred-member organization is xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and many members hold neo-Nazi beliefs, including Holocaust denial. Many were also Real Finns, had political aspirations, and had toned down their rhetoric as those aspirations increased. Still, it was poisonous. Some had been involved in race crimes. I thought I could get their membership role subpoenaed.
Neo-Nazis were well organized in many cities. They had several dozen full-time activists and large memberships, especially in the Joensuu area. The neo-Nazi demographic had changed. The movement was growing by leaps and bounds among university students. Academics had joined them. They were discussing forming their own political party, which requires five thousand signatures, and were close to getting them. They embraced the swastika. That kind of confidence speaks for itself. “If a party’s leader wants to be a führer, then so what?” said a leading neo-Nazi.
The police and department of corrections began sending records of those convicted of hate crimes in batches, usually sorted by municipality but not by crime. There were thousands. Each one had to be looked at individually.