Turku attack challenges criminology

Abstract

On Friday afternoon, 18 August 2017, an asylum seeker stabbed 10 supposedly randomly chosen people in the centre of Turku. Police investigates the knife attack as terrorism. The suspect has been directed to mental examination and we have to wait for the final analyses of the case. Finnish Security Intelligence Service had raised its terrorist threat assessment already before, and that way the attack was expected. Still, it was a surreal experience to announce to friends around the world that I was safe during the Turku attack. Turku is such a small town (with less than 190,000 inhabitants) that the crime touched the whole community in a more concrete way than in large metropolises. Finland is a violent country. Measured by homicide rates, we are between East and West. After the Turku attack, it has been discussed whether it was a continuation of the Finnish tradition of violence or a sign of a new kind of threat. Finland has become notorious for school shootings, and parallels have been drawn between the knife attack and school shootings. There are certain similarities between these phenomena: there have been warning signs such as the offender refraining from normal social interactions and seeking support from extremist international networks. However, according to news reports, there seems to be a religious component and motivation in the Turku attack. As the attack happened, there was an urgent need for information about the events. However, legal scholars blamed the Minister of the Interior for informing the public about the looks of the suspect and mentioning Turku and Barcelona in the same speech. Professor of Sociology of Law declared not to be afraid. At the same time, the police were widely thanked for highly professional and prompt action. After the attack, there were reports of people turning to police to ‘refuel safety’. Suddenly, the dogma of critical criminology was silenced as police proved their relevance in protecting the public. In Finland, the criminality risk among asylum seekers is a sensitive and contested topic. Therefore, in this year’s Stockholm Criminology Symposium, I was interested to hear a presentation by Norwegian colleagues who showed that the risk of offending is linked with immigrant status and the reason of immigration. When I asked the presenters if they had experienced critical social media campaigns, they did not seem to be touched by the problem. In Finland, there is a tendency to highlight the third task of university, which is to interact with society on the basis of scientific knowledge. However, there is a risk that this will give academics a free mandate to do politics detached from scientific evidence. Instead of political statements of not being in fear or taking up every word of the authorities who are trying to protect the public, the primary task of sociolegal scholars should be to analyse what factors are behind crimes such as terrorism and what are the evidence-based measures to decrease criminality. Unfortunately, there is a bias in the Finnish sociolegal field, where police are seen more as a threat than an important crime-preventive actor, where security is seen as something to criticize and where ideology outweighs what works in crime prevention. There is a risk that evidence-based scholars leave university to escape the structural conditions that favour ideological over empirical science, for example, in recruitment or funding decisions. As of September 2017, I have started as Development Manager at the National Institute for Health and Welfare. My task is to coordinate and develop victim-offender mediation and other