I do not believe it is the Government's job to make the punishment fit the crime. I do believe it is the Government's job to keep citizens safe from criminals. Part of that job necessitates that criminals be examined and sentenced based on how dangerous they are to society.
The concept behind "Hate crimes" may seem silly to those who think that murder is murder, no matter who the victim. I guess that's true on an individual level. If you're only thinking of the Justice System as a way to distribute punishment. But when you stop to think about the implications of murder on the rest of society, laws against hate crimes do have a purpose.
There is a huge difference between someone murdering someone out of spite, jealousy, anger, or greed, and someone murdering someone because they happen to be Black or Gay or [insert religion here]. When that murderer is released back into society because he or she served the time deemed appropriate for punishment for murder, they are still a danger to society. Their killing wasn't inspired by hatred toward a specific person, who is now gone. Their anger is directed toward an entire class of citizens, and those citizens are no longer safe with this criminal on the street.
Racists and homophobic people may be ignorant, but on their own, they are relatively harmless to society. Which is why hate crime laws don't infringe on people's freedom to believe whatever they want. When that ignorance is transformed into a hatred so powerful that they feel the need to commit hate crimes, they become a danger to society, not just one person. And, while I don't think it is the Government's job to subsidize businesses and reform health care, I do believe it is responsible for the safety of law-abiding citizens. All citizens. Even the Gay ones. Which is why I support an expansion of the Hate Crime law.
I Support Hate Crime Laws
By sawaboof - Posted on October 23rd, 2009
Until we develop reliable methods of devining the thoughts that are running through a criminal's head, we are going to have problems with unequal enforcement. People who are foolish enough to utter words of hatred while they commit crimes will be charged with hate crimes and others who are smarter and keep their mouth's shut while they carry out their hatred will not receive this harsher treatment. This will result in some criminals being punished more harshly than others for the same crime. Most haters will quickly learn to not provide the prosecution of evidence of their hatred.
Of course this problem could be solved if we just made all inter-racial crime prima facie evidence of hatred. I would be OK with that so long as the extremely common instances of black on white and Hispanic on white crime were treated as hate crimes right along with the much less common instances of white on other race crimes.
For some reason it seems that our legal system only thinks whites are capable of hate crimes and until that situation changes, I will be against criminalizing thoughts whether they be hateful or not. I would be a lot more positive about hate crime legislation if I saw some kids being prosecuted for hate crimes in this example:
Racist Bellevulle West High School Bus Beating Caught On Tape
There is no doubt in my mind that if a bunch of white kids were beating on a black kid that there would have been hate crime charges.
And here is another good example where hate crimes should have been charged but were not:
Is political correctness to blame for lack of coverage over horrific black-on-white killings in America's Deep South?
Is there any doubt that if a gang of white guys had sodomized and then executed a black man and then repeatedly gang raped his black girl friend for hours including with a chair leg and poisoned and douched her with clorox that there would have been hate crime charges?
But these black guys were not charged with hate crimes because apparently at some point they had dated white women and that proved they were not haters. Yeah ..... right!!!!
Note that in both of these cases that these crimes were not inspired by hatred towards a particular person who is now gone. These crimes fit the criteria which you identified above where the people are a greater danger to society because they hate a whole class of people.
Laws that cannot be enforced evenly for all races are a VERY BAD IDEA!
People who are foolish enough to utter words of hatred while they commit crimes will be charged with hate crimes and others who are smarter and keep their mouth's shut while they carry out their hatred will not receive this harsher treatment. This will result in some criminals being punished more harshly than others for the same crime. Most haters will quickly learn to not provide the prosecution of evidence of their hatred.
Would you not agree that this is true of ALL criminals and crimes? It will always be harder to convict smart criminals than it is to convict stupid ones. Does that mean that we should ignore crimes altogether, because smarter criminals are harder to catch?
There is no doubt in my mind that if a bunch of white kids were beating on a black kid that there would have been hate crime charges.
Contrary to popular conservative beliefs, not every fight that occurs between a white person and someone of a different race results in hate crime charges being filed against the white person. In fact, hate crime against white victims are reported and prosecuted quite reqularly (D.O.J. Hate Crime Statistics for 2007). Does that mean that anti-white hate crimes are under-reported and under-prosecuted? Maybe. In THIS case, however, the prosecuting attorney stated that...
If one puts aside the senasationalized media coverage of the case--which is what we expect our justice system to do, isn't it?--this doesn't seem like much of a hate crime.
Is there any doubt that if a gang of white guys had sodomized and then executed a black man and then repeatedly gang raped his black girl friend for hours including with a chair leg and poisoned and douched her with clorox that there would have been hate crime charges?
Yes, there is a doubt, especially when (as your own source points out)...
I mean, if both the defense AND the prosecution agree that the incident wasn't racially motivated, it seems just a little bit rediculous to presume that the only reason that the attacker wasn't charged with a hate crime was because the victim was white.
Laws that cannot be enforced evenly for all races are a VERY BAD IDEA!
So far, you haven't provided any actual evidence that would suggest that these laws AREN'T being enforced "equally" for citizens of all races. The simple fact (and the (D.O.J. statistics ) clearly indicate this) that the members of some groups face a significantly higher incidence of identity-motivated crime.
To use a metaphor, if you have a scale that is out of balance, the way that you even it up is to add weight to the "light" side of the scale. That's what these laws do. The reality is that there are elements in our society that feel that it is more acceptable to commit crimes against certain identity groups, because of the general perception that those groups are either A) easier to victimize or B) part of a group against which the criminal has a personal bias. In EITHER case, the members of these targetted groups are faced with an imbalanced scale, and these laws serve to even things back out.
Also, there is nothing new or even particularly radical about these laws. Hate crime laws have been around since at least the 1960's, and their consitutitionality is well precedented. To quote a former conservative Chief Justice William Rhenquist, who was writing for the Court in the case of Wisconsin v. Mitchell (1993)...
TTFN,
Blackout
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To use a metaphor, if you have a scale that is out of balance, the way that you even it up is to add weight to the "light" side of the scale. That's what these laws do. The reality is that there are elements in our society that feel that it is more acceptable to commit crimes against certain identity groups, because of the general perception that those groups are either A) easier to victimize or B) part of a group against which the criminal has a personal bias. In EITHER case, the members of these targetted groups are faced with an imbalanced scale, and these laws serve to even things back out.
Interesting metaphor. By far and away the group it best describes is whites who are vastly disproportionately the victims of violent inter-racial crime. I've produced these statistics before elsewhere. I suppose if you insist I can do it again. Rape for example, according to most law enforcement professionals and most feminists is almost by definition a crime of hatred. White on black rapes are almost non-existent while black on white rapes are all to common. But it is unusual for the government to tip the balance in favor of whites by tacking on a hate crimes charge.
...but frankly, I'm skeptical of your conclusion. In terms of raw numbers, I would not be surprised to learn that most victims of crime are white. But when you say that they are "disproportionately" the victims in these cases, I am forced to wonder how those numbers stack up in terms of the relative size of the respectively affected populations, which if not taken into account is a statistical fallacy. Based on the D.O.J. statistics for 2007, your assertion doesn't stand up (see below).
The current population of the U.S. is roughtly 307,768,000. White people make up approximately 74% of that population, or 227,748,320. According to the D.O.J. statistics, there were roughly 907 reported crimes that were committed because of an anti-white bias. That's a ratio of approximately 1:251,100. African American people make up approximately 13% of the U.S. population. The same report notes that there were 3435 crimes that were motivated by an anti-black bias. The black population is about 40,009,840, making the ratio of risk about 1:11,647. Thus, black people are almost 22 times more likely to be targetted for a crime because they are black, than a white person is because they are white.
I also have to wonder what you mean by "inter-racial crime," which isn't the same as a racially motivated crime. Just because a crime involves a perpetrator and a victim of different races doesn't automatically make something a hate crime. The D.O.J. statistics I gave you clearly do not support the relevance of your assertions to the issue being discussed, here.
White on black rapes are almost non-existent while black on white rapes are all to common. But it is unusual for the government to tip the balance in favor of whites by tacking on a hate crimes charge.
Again, the statistics don't back up your conclusion that hate crimes are being inequitably applied, because rapes are rarely classified as hate crimes, regardless of the race of the victim. The D.O.J. statistics only classified 2 rapes as hate crimes for 2007, which is statistically insignificant.
TTFN,
Blackout
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Our justice system is almost incapable of defining a crime against a white person as racially or hate motivated. And it is almost automatic to define crimes which happen the other direction as hate motivated. I am not at all impressed by your citation of DOJ statistics because I think the DOJ is a big part of the problem. They refuse to classify crimes committed against whites as hate crimes while they are very quick to classify crimes against minorities as hate crimes. The fact that the vast preponderance of inter-racial crime is against whites yet the DOJ can only manage to classsify a tiny fraction of these crimes as hate motivated illustrates my point that the hate crime laws are inheriently unfair because the justice community has no intention of applying them in a fair and equal manner.
The Color of Crime
Interracial Crime
•Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.
•Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.
•Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.
•Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa
So 85% of interracial crimes are black on white while 15% go the other direction. That means that blacks are about 7 times more likely to commit these crimes but for some reason the DOJ only manages to designate 2.25 times as many of these crimes as racially motivated. That stretches credibility and does not pass the smell test.
Here is the first link that came up on inter-racial rape. They are pretty easy to find.
The Truth of Interracial Rape in the United States
In Table 42, entitled "Personal crimes of violence, 2005, percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender," we learn that there were 111,590 white victims and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault in 2005. (The number of rapes is not distinguished from those of sexual assaults; it is maddening that sexual assault, an ill-defined category that covers various types of criminal acts ranging from penetration to inappropriate touching, is conflated with the more specific crime of rape.) In the 111,590 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was white, 44.5 percent of the offenders were white, and 33.6 percent of the offenders were black. In the 36,620 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was black, 100 percent of the offenders were black, and 0.0 percent of the offenders were white. The table explains that 0.0 percent means that there were under 10 incidents nationally.
The table does not gives statistics for Hispanic victims and offenders. But the bottom line on interracial white/black and black/white rape is clear:
In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man.
What this means is that every day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man.
According to your statistics above, the DOJ can only find some 900+ cases of crimes where the motive is hate. Apparently they have not delved very deep into their own statistics because rape is almost always described as a crime motivated by hate. I am almost certain that if any gay man were raped by a heterosexual that the gay community would be screaming hate crime. Yet the DOJ is unable to find the 37460 white females who were raped by black men and properly classify these as hate crimes or properly punish the offenders with the extra weight of the law reserved for crimes motivated by hatred.
because rapes are rarely classified as hate crimes, regardless of the race of the victim.
Exactly! A crime that is primarily motivated by hate is not classified as a hate crime. Imagine that! It is inconvenient that the victims are almost NEVER minorities and are almost always white.
My problem with hate crime laws is that the law and justice community has no intention of applying them equally. The statistics you presented bear this out perfectly.
The mere fact that you used The New Century Foundation as a source is enough to make me question the objectivity of your comments. The organization was founded by white supremicist and separatist Jared Taylor, and is hardly a reputable source. Taylor's American Renaissance organization has hosted events that included speakers from Stormfront and the Council of Conservative Citizens (both white supremicist organizations), the Institute for Historical Review (which denies the Holocaust), as well as your second source, Lawrence Auster, who is also known for his racist writings.
A crime that is primarily motivated by hate is not classified as a hate crime.
I think that your anecdotal assumption that rape is "primarily motivated by hate" is both anecdotal and unsupportable.
My problem with hate crime laws is that the law and justice community has no intention of applying them equally. The statistics you presented bear this out perfectly.
I really have to wonder at how you arrived at this conclusion. You said that hate crimes didn't apply when white people were the victims. The D.O.J. statistics proves that this was false. You cited two cases where you thought they should be classified as hate crimes. In one of those cases, both the prosecution and defense agreed that race was not at issue in the case. In the other, an initial charge of a hate crime was made by one officer, but the investigation into that charge did not bear out the accusation. Now you have turned to two blatant white supremicists to make your case.
Honestly, I don't know why you would expect that anyone would take you seriously after you cite these bozos.
TTFN,
Blackout
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I just took the first thing that popped up on google. I should have done more research.
Here is essentially the same statistics focusing on inter-racial murder straight from the Justice Department.
Bureau of Justice Statistics
No matter where the data comes from, the fact remains that despite the fact that blacks are a much smaller percentage of the total population than whites, a white person is many times more likely to be victimized by a black person then the other way around.
One group is many times more likely to be the victim of inter-racial crime and it is whites. Yet, we are suppossed to believe that these crimes are motivated by something other than hate?
To use a metaphor, if you have a scale that is out of balance, the way that you even it up is to add weight to the "light" side of the scale. That's what these laws do. The reality is that there are elements in our society that feel that it is more acceptable to commit crimes against certain identity groups, because of the general perception that those groups are either A) easier to victimize or B) part of a group against which the criminal has a personal bias. In EITHER case, the members of these targetted groups are faced with an imbalanced scale, and these laws serve to even things back out.
There is a group that fits your description above perfectly. Yet they are not receiving fair benefit from these laws and are much more likely to be charged using them.
My answer to this, as I said in my first post is to treat inter-racial, inter-ethnicity, and even inter-sexual orientation events as prima facie evidence of hate. At sentencing, let the perpetrator present evidence that he was motivated by other factors.
Also, as I have stated many times before, we should be punishing criminals much more harshly. Most murderers should be executed. If you want to execute perpetrators motivated by hate by flogging them to death and perpetrators motivated by greed with the lethal injection, I really don't have a problem with that.
It is not hard to believe they are motivated by poverty, desperation, and indifference towards others. If criminals (of any race) randomly picked their targets, you should expect most victims to be white. This unbalances the interracial crime stats. Now consider that many crimes are targeted towards the wealthy, who are overwhelmingly white. This is not hatred but prudent thievery. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the motives behind murder, by race.
The point still remains non-sequitur, unless you can demonstrate that these crimes are motivated by race. The statistics you cite do not do this.
The most basic error in your position is that you fail to provide any kind of context for the data you cite, and are making assumptions of causaility based on a narrowly viewed cross-section of the available data. Your conclusions are at best over-simplified, and fail to address the elephant in the room, which is the fact that poverty has a causal relationship with violent crime, and that African-Americans are "vastly disproportionately" subject to the impovershed strata of our society.
One group is many times more likely to be the victim of inter-racial crime and it is whites. Yet, we are suppossed to believe that these crimes are motivated by something other than hate?
Conclusions should flow from the evidence, not the other way around. The facts are that almost 2/3 of the U.S. population is white. If we were to factor out ALL considerations of motive, we would expect that 75% of all victims would also be white. When we look at the statistics your source gives us, however, we find that whites only account for 48% of victims. Therefore, the statistics would indicate that even when we were to factor in an anti-white motivation, white people would STILL be under represented in the actual outcomes that we see.
TTFN,
Blackout
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Check out Progressive PRIDE, a Gay-Straight Alliance for the ProU community.