Hate Crime Laws and 2003 U.S. Statistics

The FBI released its statistics on 2003 hate crimes a couple of days ago and I, for one, find that sort of stuff quite interesting. To summarise the main findings, there were 7,489 hate crimes in the United States last year, including 14 murders.

Six of the 14 murders were committed as a result of a sexual-orientation bias, five involved racial prejudice, two were committed because of a bias against an ethnicity and one was the result of a hostility toward a disability, the bureau said.

Intimidation was the most often reported hate crime against an individual followed by simple assault, it said.

Damage, destruction and vandalism was the most frequently reported hate crime offense against property, accounting for 83 percent of all such offenses.

Of the total 7,489 hate crimes reported in 2003, just over half were motivated by racial bigotry. Nearly 18 percent were caused by religious intolerance and nearly 17 percent were the result of a sexual-orientation bias.

The FBI said the crimes were committed by 6,934 reported offenders -- just over 62 percent of them white and about 19 percent black.

While it’s good to note that murders form such a low percentage of hate crimes, it still causes one to stop and think when you realize that 7,489 hate crimes equals an average of 20.5 crimes a day, purely motivated by hate for another person’s religion, race, gender, sexual orientation and so forth.

I’ll now summarise some of the other findings on the report, although you can download the entire document from the FBI’s website. Beginning with racially-motivated crimes there were 3,844 incidents, of which 2,548 were anti-black and 830 were anti-white, with the majority of the remainder being anti-Asian.

Anti-religion crimes numbered 1,343 in 2003, of which 927 were anti-Jewish. While, as people know me may know, I have a large problem with those people who equate criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism. However, at the same time this stat should reaffirm the unfortunate prevalence that anti-Semitism itself has in our society today. While Arabs deal with institutional and governmental racism, Jewish individuals deal with racist actions on a day-to-day basis more than any other religious group. Neither kind is right, and unfortunately I doubt either kind will be rectified in the near future.

Hate crimes dealing with sexual orientation were almost as common as those dealing with religion. There were 1,239 hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation, of which 1,217 were anti-homosexual. Not surprisingly the majority of these anti-homosexual hate crimes were directed against gay men. Of the other 19, 8 were anti-bisexual, which really could qualify them under the first categorization, while there were 14 anti-heterosexual hate crimes in the U.S. in 2003. That’s right; even if you are straight you are not safe. Dick Cheney would have a field day.

Of the murders, all six anti-gay murders were committed against homosexual males, while the five racially motivated hate crimes were committed against four black individuals and one white person. Interestingly, the violent incidents seem to be clustered, as the 14 murders occur in only seven states: Arkansas (2), California (4), Louisiana (1), North Carolina (2), Tennessee (1), Texas (1) and Washington (3).

Perusing the crime locations by state (at least for the jurisdictions that reported statistics to the FBI), New Jersey, surprisingly, appears to be the most dangerous state when it comes to hate crimes. There were 594 incidents with a population of 8,638,396, which meant you had a 0.00688% chance of being a victim of a hate crime in that state. California had the most hate crimes, 1,472, but there you only had a 0.0041483% chance of being a victim.

Interestingly, a lot of “redneck” states had the lowest rates in the country. In Louisiana one only had a 0.00020% chance of being a victim (out of only 7 incidents, one was a murder), in Alabama it was 0.00043% and in Mississippi it was 0.00012%. A lot of these red states actually seem more tolerant than the blue states.

However, the immediate question becomes, “What is the per capita frequency of hate crimes, within the categories?” While there are fewer hate crimes in Alabama than in New York, I’d wager there is substantially fewer African-Americans, Jews and homosexuals in that state, too. That’s not something that has available statistics at this point in time, so although those stats might, at first glance, seem surprising, we can’t draw any real conclusions from them.

The per-capita rate of hate crime incidents would actually be quite informative in trying to identify the specific areas of the country where actions to promote diversity and tolerance need to be considered. I’d also be interested in examining other linkages, such as how closely does it correspond to the red state/blue state divide. My guess is that it does roughly, at least. Also, are there any linkages between governmental policy and statements and hate crimes? Does a statement like Rick Santorum’s infamous quote encourage people to commit crimes against GLBT individuals? What about Jim DeMint’s statement of, “If a person is a practicing homosexual, they should not be teaching in our schools.” This would likely be incredibly hard to figure out, given the existing problems of getting accurate figures on homosexuals, especially those who are openly homosexual and thus more likely to be the victim of a hate crime and then trying to isolate the other variables so one can determine, at least roughly, if official intolerance promotes civilian hate crimes.

On the general issue of hate crimes themselves, I support hate crime legislation. I do not see it as being inconsistent with the justice system to hand out harsher punishments for one sort of murder over another, as that is exactly what we do when distinguishing between first and second degree murder and manslaughter. There are different punishments for different sorts of robberies, so there is no problem with looking at different sentencing for murders.

Hate crime legislation is necessary because the victims in hate crimes were targeted because of who they represented, as opposed to who they are. A robber might target a rich individual because he is rich and thus the reward from the robbery is greater than it would otherwise be. A lover might murder his spouse because she is threatening to leave him. A target in a hate crime is not targeted because of the specific individual he or she is, but rather because he or she possess characteristics that make them representative of a group that the offender has come to hate. They are not targeted because of who they are; they are targeted because they are mentally disabled, for example.

I believe that in order to demonstrate the tolerance of our society and our unwillingness to stand for hatred of identifiable groups. We need to emphasise that murder motivated by factors opposed to those values should be punished severely. Although I have no statistical evidence to prove this (because I haven’t looked, not because there is none), it seems logical to me that hate crime offenders are much more likely to re-offend than other sorts of offenders. Someone who another person in a bar right, or who rapes a girl on a date who won’t engage sexually with him may not re-offend. However, the hate crime perpetrator hates his target group, and that hate does not subside, so it seems only logical he’d use the next available opportunity to commit another act against them. Thus, the purpose of protection is also served through hate crime legislation. We must not allow discrimination to occur against any person through religious beliefs, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disability or anything similar, and hate crime laws are an effective and necessary way to demonstrate our intolerance and protect members of minority groups.