Makes one wonder if this attitude is the reason there is no reporting at all from Birmingham, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The south is peaceful. An armed society is a polite society.
All kidding aside. It could be. Politics gets in the way of law enforcement very commonly.
All nonsense aside, the only way one could possibly legitimately think that there were no hate crimes all those years those cities never filed reports would be to believe that there was no such thing as a “hate crime” at all.
I’m not saying that every crime is a hate crime. I’m saying we should acknowledge the possibility that racism might be a motive for some crimes. We should collect the data and look at all of it to see if there’s a pattern that supports the possibility that racism is a motive for a group of crimes.
If one car owned by a black person gets burned on Martin Luther King Day, that’s probably just a coincidence. But if you find out that over a period of ten years several dozen cars have all been set on fire on Martin Luther King Day (despite the fact that this is fifty times higher than the normal daily rate of car vandalism) and that all of them had black owners (despite the fact that only ten percent of the cars in this town are owned by black people) then you’ve got a pattern. And you’re never going to see that pattern unless you collect the data.
That’s true. Sometimes political pressure is pushing the police to investigate crimes that didn’t really happen. And sometimes political pressure is pushing the police to look the other way on crimes that did happen.
But on balance, I’d rather have the police investigating too many crimes and finding out some of them are false than have them investigating too few crimes and missing some real ones.
No one said you did.
Agreed - what data are there to suggest that the car fire was motivated by racism, and therefore should have been reported as a possible hate crime so the police could look for patterns?
Regards,
Shodan
Police department nullification.
Albino penguins.
Contrary to this common white supremacist myth, black-on-white crime actually does constitute a large share of hate crimes that are reported and prosecuted. Black-on-white hate crimes constitute around 20% of reported hate crimes each year (while black-on-white crime hover around 10% of violent crime overall, within a few percentage points of white-on-black violent crime).
Without disputing what you are saying, can I get a link so I can dig into those percentages myself?
The 2014 data tableset is here. It shows that anti-white hate crimes were 22% in that year, with the majority of that being black, multi-racial, or unknown race perpetrators.
For violent crime statistics generally, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has all of that.
How often have you heard of Black-On-White crime deemed a hate crime? I rarely hear it. I can’t think one instance right off hand. You don’t have to a be White Supremacist to draw that inference. What about the riots where Blacks target Asian stores? Those are never called hate crimes.
The actual stats were linked directly above your post in post #32 and #29. ‘How often have you heard of …’ is arguing from ignorance.
You don’t have to be a white supremacist to believe this myth. I agree. You just have to live in a society that has a lot of racist mythologizing and not think too critically about it.
You may well be right that the media doesn’t report on how often hate crimes laws are used to prosecute black people. Why do you think that is?
As posters have shown, black-on-white crimes are reported as hate crimes. If the news sources that you listen to are saying otherwise, either explicitly or by omission, now is the time when you need to consider finding other news sources.
I don’t know where you’re trying to go with this. I didn’t set up the FBI profile. But I’m going to assume they looked at past crimes with a racial motive and found factors they often held in common. They then made a list of those factors and are using them to track new crimes which might also have a racial motive.
As for the specific detail here, it seems pretty easy to believe that racist criminals might choose to commit crimes directed against black people on Martin Luther King Day. So while not every crime committed against a black victim on MLK day is a race crime, it’s a possibility that a good police investigation should consider.
Thanks to both of you. Interesting data, in the way that a train wreck is interesting.
I’m trying to determine if the belief that the case in the article is a hate crime is evidence-based.
Why is it easy to believe with no evidence? There’s no evidence that she started the fire either - should it be reported as a possible arson?
Four years ago, some black woman claims her car was torched on MLK Day, therefore under-reporting of hate crimes is a significant issue. That’s a little underwhelming.
Regards,
Shodan
So that’s the silly point you’re trying to push here? That all the statistics reported on, all the cases of major metropolitan areas not making any reports at all, the other cases of obvious underreporting for various reasons-these were just a small side note that had no real bearing on the story, and if you can just tear the sample story at the beginning of the article apart the whole article just falls apart at the seams?
Try this: Skip that beginning story if it bothers you so much, and read the all the rest of the article that has nothing to do with that story.