Is robbery a lighter charge than assault? I’m not sure. From the linked article:
As an aside, that’s quite a collection of charges to argue in court, and a lot of chances to hand out lengthy jail sentences. Maybe the prosecutors feel that having to argue hate crime in addition to all of the above, in multiple proceedings, adds unnecessary complication. In any event, if one has a serious beef with this, maybe they should make their opinion known to the Minneapolis DA’s office.
I would say a senseless beating without a motive is likely driven by hate and would be investigated as such.
That it might be motivated by “lots of things” doesn’t negate the investigative process.
We have no idea from the limited info available as to whether the investigation included an assessment as to whether a hate crime was committed, just what charges were eventually brought.
Robbery (and rioting) are charges that have a reasonable chance of successful prosecution in these cases. They are acts which can be observed via video evidence, buttressed by what the original linked article refers to as “partial confessions” by several of the suspects. To successfully argue a hate crime would require proving a motive, something that the quoted poster agrees cannot be readily determined by viewing the videos in question and perhaps was never confessed by any of the suspects. It seems entirely reasonable to think that the prosecutors did not feel they had sufficient evidence of a hatred motivation to make such a charge worth the effort.
Lastly consider this:
Note that robbery does not seem to be included in the above list. Assault is, but for whatever reason assault does not appear to have been charged in any of the pending cases.
Or comic relief.
If it were you maybe.
That doesn’t make it a hate crime.
Beating someone up because it’s fun, because you want to beat on someone, because they resisted a robbery, because they talked to your sister, none of those are hate crimes even if you were part of a mob who beat a person to near death.
What makes it a hate crime is very straightforward, did you beat the person up because of your bias against their race, religion, sexuality, etc.?
Certainly it’s possible that this mob went out looking for a white person to beat up, but hate crime charges shouldn’t get anywhere unless there’s evidence they went out looking for a white person to beat up and rob, or that they beat up this particular white person because they hate white people.
I’m in favor of an investigation. Has an investigation of hate crime charges been initiated? The brief article doesn’t say.
Some in this thread have decided these attacks were hate crimes based on the linked article, with no further evidence presented. If investigators find reason to believe these were hate crimes, I will accept their findings. I’m not going to jump to the conclusion that they were based on the thin reporting in the linked outrage bait, though.
Still, we’ve gone from “this is a hate crime!!” to “there should be an investigation”, so I guess that’s progress.
young males are the most dangerous and destructive things in the world.
Never miss an opportunity to play the victim. Pathetic.
Looks like first degree robbery in Minnesota is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Sounds about right.
Eighteen white guys beat up on a single black guy while they take the black guy’s stuff. Hate crime?
Despite all the gabbing and hypotheticals about whether this or that thing is a hate crime, it’s worth noting that hate crimes are very hard to prosecute because you have to establish the criminal’s motivation, which is really something only the criminal knows. Many crimes that appear on the surface to be potential hate crimes are prosecuted as workaday crimes for which criminals get sent to the same prisons.
I was a bit triggered by this video, because it was so eerily similar to an assault my friend and I endured in Denver in the 1990s. It started as a similarly sized group of teenage toughs materializing around us and “asking” for money before crossing over to violence. None of them were as big as my friend and I, but with sheer numbers they just swarmed us. It was the same kind of thing, where once we were down on the ground they amused themselves with taking running jumps to stomp on our heads and stuff like that. No one had a bicycle or potted plant though.
Although it appeared that everyone in the gang of teenagers was nonwhite (at least in the common vernacular: they were mostly Hispanic, so I guess technically they were “non-non-Hispanic-white”?), that was also true of our saviors. I am not at all confident that we would have survived or at least stayed out of intensive care, had it not been for an elderly black lady who was in a car with her friend across the shopping center parking lot. Maybe they were the last stragglers after the stores closed or something, because there was no one else around. She came driving up, very bravely, and caused the youths to scatter. She got out and told us how she had seen what was happening from a distance and told her friend “They aren’t playing!” I will always be grateful to her. I used to say I would always be grateful to “them”, but the more I think about it, the more I suspect that the driver may have been overcoming the (admittedly understandable) resistance of her passenger to getting involved.
Getting back to this similar crime in my state of Minnesota, I hope there are serious consequences beyond just a stint in juvie. But I don’t believe they should be charged with hate crimes, because I don’t believe anyone should be charged with what I call “thoughtcrime”. There should be serious penalties for assault and battery, regardless of the motivation.
I got everything i needed to make what I guess to be an accurate surmisal of this OP without even clicking on the thread. Title/username combo alone gave me more than enough info to know this was a vile, racist, whataboutist piece of predictable garbage.
So how’d I do?
It is absolutely terrible you went through that, SlackerInc.
Thanks, Ravenman. My friend got hurt worse than I did (he clearly had a concussion, and was bloodied and bruised all over) because he stayed up and tried to fight back. I immediately went into the fetal position and covered my head with my hands. I think I still may have gotten a concussion, although it was somewhat hard to tell because we had just smoked a bunch of weed.
Once they started taking turns with their leaping kicks on me as a stationary target, I became less sure about my defensive strategy. But I don’t know how staying up and running would have helped either, since it was a long way to any building or anything.
they amused themselves with taking running jumps to stomp on our heads and stuff like that. No one had a bicycle or potted plant though.
What is “stuff like that” when talking about stomping on your head? That is about the most vicious attack i can imagine without additional use of a weapon. Aside from my curiosity about what constitutes things similar to having one’s head stomped onto concrete, I feel like yall had the biggest stroke of good luck ever escaping that ordeal without devastating, permanent brain damage. Wow. The spaghetti monster loves yo white ass! 
I guess “stuff like that” really just means other kinds of flying kicks to various parts of our bodies, or at least mine (once I was down I kept my eyes closed).
We did indeed have good luck, although it clearly was not going to hold if the ladies didn’t drive up—unless these kids were just about to get bored and give up.
They never did get our money, by the way, although I would have gladly turned mine over to avoid the beating. But they really didn’t ever offer that stark choice, flipping like a switch from a vaguely ominous request (“can we have some money?” which we answered with a claim that we didn’t have any) to an all out assault pretty much instantly.
I guess I should have pulled my wallet out and thrown it on the ground with a plea to take it and leave us alone, but it did not occur to me at the time and they seemed like they had gone into riot mode by then anyway, just as in that video where most of the violence does not appear to be in service of robbing the guy.
BTW, the second video at that link talks about people stealing cell phones. Are they really any good once stolen? If you don’t have the passcode and they can be tracked and so on, what’s the point?
ETA: I do also think the devastating brain damage was avoided, at least up to that point, by the fact that a lot of these kids looked to be 100 pounds soaking wet. One on one, or even one against two, I would not have taken them seriously assuming they didn’t carry weapons. But there were at least a dozen of them altogether.
Yeah, nobody here is going to touch that.
Just one more way to sadistically violate the victim. Really, that’s most of what was happening, at least in the first video at the OP’s link (I didn’t watch the second). When the victim didn’t immediately cave in and hand over his phone, they all swarmed together to make him submit. It wasn’t about the cell phone, it was an opportunistic beat-down for the sake of entertainment and, one-upmanship driven by peer pressure (“jumping on his head, good one…but watch THIS…”).