The Great Hate Crimes Hoax, Much Ado About Not Much

The Great Hate Crimes Hoax:

Much Ado About Not Much

by Jared Taylor

The idea of "hate" crimes and the increased penalties attached to them are a radical departure from traditional criminal justice in that they punish certain motivations more than others. Increased penalties are justified by pointing out that the law has always taken a criminal's state of mind into account: Was the killing deliberate or an accident? Was it planned in cold blood or done in the heat of the moment? However, these are questions of intent, and intent is, indeed, a factor in determining guilt. "Hate"crimes break new ground by considering motive. Traditionally the law does not care about motive. You are just as guilty of murder whether you kill a man because he stole your wife, black-mailed you, or stepped on your toe.

Hate crime laws require that the courts search for certain motives and add extra penalties if they find them. Therefore, if you punch a man in the nose because he took your parking spot or because he was unbearably ugly or because you just felt like punching someone that day, you are guilty of assault. If you say "nigger" and punch a black man you are guilty of a hate crime and are punished more severely. Like almost all recent innovations in morals, what started with race has expanded to "sexual orientation" and even disabilities like blindness or feeblemindedness.

Ever since 1990, when Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act, the FBI has been charged with collecting national statistics on criminal acts "motivated, in whole or in part, by bias." The law does not force local police departments to supply this information but most do. In 1997, the most recent year for which data are available, the FBI received "hate crime" information from 11,211 local agencies serving more than 83 percent of the United States population.

That year, there was a total of 9,861 "hate crimes," of which 6,981 were based on race or ethnic origin. The rest were for reasons of religion (1,493, of which 1,159 were anti-Jewish), sexual orientation (1,375, of which 14 were anti-heterosexual), or disability (12).

The FBI reports 8,474 suspected offenders whose race was known - 5,344 were white and 1,629 were black. Their crimes can be divided into violent and nonviolent offenses, and by calculating rates we find that blacks were 1.99 times more likely than whites to commit hate crimes in general and 2.24 times more likely to commit violent hate crimes. This overrepresentation of blacks in hate crimes, not just in race bias cases but in all categories, runs counter to the common impression that whites are the virtually exclusive perpetrators of hate crimes and are certainly more likely to commit them than blacks. The real significance of "hate" crimes, however, is their small number. Of the 6,981 offenses based on race or ethnicity, only 4,105 were violent, involving murder, rape, robbery, or assault. The rest were such things as vandalism and intimidation. These numbers are almost insignificant compared to the 1,766,000 interracial crimes of violence (combining both single - and multiple- offender offenses) reported in the Department of Justice survey for 1994.

How important is the distinction between interracial crimes that are officially designated as hate crimes and those that are not? For a crime to be considered a hate crime, the perpetrator must make his motive clear, usually by saying something nasty. It is not hard to imagine that of the nearly two million interracial crimes committed in 1994, some - perhaps even a great many -were , "motivated, in whole or in part, by bias" but the perpetrators didn't bother to say so.

Given the realities of race in the United States, would it be unreasonable for someone attacked by a criminal of a different race to wonder whether race had something to do with the attack, even if his assailant said nothing? Such suspicions are even more likely in the case of the 490,266 acts of group violence that crossed racial lines in 1994. A white woman gang-raped by blacks or a black man cornered and beaten by whites will think he was singled out at least in part because of race, even if the attackers said nothing.

Hate crime laws assume that special harm is done to society when people are attacked because of race. But which does more damage to society: the few thousand violent acts officially labeled as hate crimes or the millions of ordinary interracial crimes of violence - 90 percent of which are committed by blacks against whites? If race relations are so fragile they must be protected with laws that add extra penalties to race-related crimes, why not automatically add extra penalties to any interracial crime, on the assumption that it harmed race relations? The problem, of course, is that most of the people slapped with heavier penalties would be black.

Hispanics

Official thinking about "hate crimes" suffers from another crushing defect. As Joseph Fallon, who has written for AR has noted, the FBI reports hate crimes against Hispanics but not by Hispanics. In the forms the FBI has local police departments fill out, Hispanics are clearly indicated as a victim category but they are not an option as a perpetrator category when the FBI asks for "Suspected Race of Offender." The FBI therefore forces local police departments to categorize most Hispanics as "white" (see p. 4). Official figures for 1997 reflect this. The total number of "hate crimes" for that year - 9,861 - includes 636 crimes of anti-Hispanic bias, but not one of the 8,474 known offenders is "Hispanic" because the FBI's data collection method doesn't permit such a designation.

If someone goes after a Mexican because he doesn't like Mexicans it is an anti-Hispanic crime. If the same Mexican commits a "hate crime" against a white, both the victim and the perpetrator are considered white. And, in fact, the 1997 FBI figures duly record 214 "white" offenders who committed anti- white hate crimes! The offenders were undoubtedly Hispanic, but the report doesn't say so. Some of the "whites" who are reported to have committed hate crimes against blacks and homosexuals are almost certainly Hispanic, but there is no way to be sure.

Hispanic perpetrators show up only if you investigate specific "hate" crimes. The FBI lists five cases of racially-motivated murder for 1997 - three "anti-black" and two "anti-white." The report says nothing about the perpetrators or the circumstances of the killings, so AR got the details from the local police departments.

Two of the anti-black killings took place in the same town, a mostly-Hispanic suburb of Los Angeles called Hawaiian Gardens. Hawaiian Gardens has a history of black-Hispanic tension that is so bad many blacks have cleared out. In one of the 1997 murders, a 24-year old black man was beaten to death by a mob of 10 to14 Hispanics who took turns smashing his head with a baseball bat. In the other, a Hispanic gang member challenged a 29-year-old black man's right to be in the neighborhood. A few minutes later he came back and shot the man in the chest. In both cases, the victims and killers did not know each other and the motivation appears to have been purely racial. These crimes are typical of what we think of as hate-crime murders, but because no Hispanics are identified as perpetrators in the FBI report, the killers were classified as white.

The third anti-black killing took place in Anchorage, Alaska. A white man, Brett Maness, killed his neighbor, a black man, Delbert White, after a brief struggle. Mr. Maness, who was growing marijuana in his apartment and kept an arsenal of weapons, had been shooting a pellet gun at Mr. White's house, and the black came over to complain. Interestingly, a jury found that Mr. Maness killed Mr. White in self-defense. The incident - which sounds rather ambiguous - was classified as a hate crime because Mr. Maness had shouted racial slurs at Mr. White in the past and because "racist" literature was found in his apartment.

The remaining two killings were classified as anti-white, but only one fits the usual idea of these crimes. Four white men were walking on a street in Palm Beach, Florida, when a car came to a stop not far from them. Two black men got out with their hands behind their backs and one said "What are you crackers looking at?" One of the white men replied, "Not you, nigger," whereupon one of the blacks brought a gun from behind his back and fired several times, killing one white and wounding another. Attackers and victims did not know each other, and the motivation appears to have been purely racial. The other anti-white killing involved a Texas businessman from India, Sri Punjabi, who shot his Mexican daughter-in-law because his son had divorced an Indian wife to marry her. Mr. Punjabi was furious because his son married someone who was not Indian. (Presumably, this crime could have been classified as anti-Hispanic rather than anti-white.)

These five "hate crime" murders reported for 1997 do not exactly fit the media image of whites brutalizing non-whites. In fact, only one perpetrator, the Alaskan, was "white" in the usually accepted sense. What was the nature of the thousands of other officially-reported hate crimes? Without examining all 9,861 of them it is impossible to say.

It is clear, though, that the FBI report gives a false impression of what is going on. It inflates the number of hate crimes committed by "whites" by calling Hispanics white, and suggests that Hispanics never commit "hate crimes." Every year, the press duly reports this nonsense. No one, apparently, ever bothers to ask why hundreds of whites are reported to be committing hate crimes against other whites. By leaving out Hispanics and blaming their crimes on whites, the FBI report paints so distorted a picture of race relations in America that it is worse than useless.