As I understand it, Minnesota doesn’t have a specific ‘hate crime’ charge that they could be charged with, instead there are enhanced penalites attached to the base crime if they’re shown to be motivated bias against specific protected classes (of which race is one). So Minnesota doesn’t ever charge someone with a ‘hate crime’, they charge them with a regular crime then as part of the trial attempt to prove that the additional penalty applies.
18 white people doing that to a black person and it’d be automatically assumed. Seems political.
I wanna know why white people can’t have their own parades.
People can assume whatever they want. It still has to get proven in a court of law, with evidence, in order for there to be a hate crime conviction.
And yet, that’s not what the law says.
And that would be the historical context that I keep referring to. These laws didn’t just pop out of nowhere.
You’re right, the law DOES actually protect everyone, and not just minorities.
Again, I don’t think the real dispute in this thread is whether the legal criteria is met for a hate crime or not. I think people are simply asking that the same standard be applied to all races. If one immediately considers whites beating up blacks to be hate motivated, then it should be the same vice versa - and ditto if one does not rush to label blacks beating whites as a hate crime, either.
The legal standard is not what one “immediately considers,” it is what can be proven in a court of law. I don’t know why this is so hard to understand.
The problem with this sort of complaint is, the people who are being measured in wondering if this particular crime is a hate crime are not necessarily the same people who would rush to assume that it was a hate crime if the races were reversed. Some of them might be - but then the criticism should be addressed specifically to that person, not made as a blanket accusation.
I’m wondering who these unnamed people are, who will immediately assume that white people beating up black people are committing hate crimes. If I saw a group of white people try to rob a black guy, then stomp him when he fought back, I’m pretty sure I would in that case go, “Huh. That looks like a bunch of sociopaths trying to rob a guy.” Has anyone in this thread said “Yeah, I automatically assume white people attacking black people are committing hate crimes”, or are we all arguing over what some hypothetical other people might do if the situation were entirely different?
And if it isn’t part of the statue it’s not part of the statue. What unspoken permutations are de-facto not hate crimes due to historical context and political considerations?
I’m not a fan of the hate crime concept. Just like I’m not a fan of categorizing speech as hate speech with the intent to criminalize it. However, if it is going to exist it should be applied evenly.
What part of my post do you think was advocating that hate crime laws should not be applied evenly?
As an aside, several posters to this thread have argued that one of the criteria that, to them, defines the cited robberies as hate crimes is the number of perpetrators involved. It would seem that a robbery and beatdown involving 18 of one racial category vs. 1 of another category = hate crime, whereas 1 vs 1 may or may not. So where’s the cutoff? 2 vs. 1? 5? 10? just curious.
Absolutely true.
But given my limited amount of mental energy, all I know is that when I go to High Holy Day services in a couple weeks, my synagogue will have metal detectors, police guards, and sign in sheets because of hate crimes. Hasidic people in Brooklyn are in hiding because of multiple attacks in broad daylight. Transwomen have murdered in recent weeks. Black people are routinely having cops called on them for innocuous behaviors.
So my heart goes out to the white victims who’s assaults may not be immediately attributed to racial hate. But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the ongoing flood of religious, race, sexual identity/orientation attacks that are happening. I struggle to work up unhappiness that a group of white guys beating down a black guy is more quickly is assumed to be racially motivated, or when a brick is thrown at an old Jewish guy, or when a gay guy is jumped leaving club, than when the majority/minority roles are reversed.
So let’s fix the actual huge problem of religious, sexual, and racially motivated attacks first, then we can really worry about the fairness of “impressions”.
None of this answers my question, nor has anyone else thus far. I was trying to turn the question around from the opposite direction and examine this crime in particular, not some other theoretical crime. So imagine you are a judge who has to decide sentencing for these young men. You know for a fact that they were acting out of racial animus. Now decide in your mind what length of prison sentence they should get for this “hate crime”.
OK, got that number in your mind?
Now, tell me why it would be a travesty of justice to give these defendants that same sentence you envisioned, if you contrariwise knew for a fact that they didn’t care about the guy’s race, but were just out to have some good clean fun by viciously beating a defenseless person in a creative variety of ways.
I don’t know about that. We are talking about race here, so let’s leave aside some of that other stuff. FBI statistics show that a larger percentage of African Americans engage in violence against white people than the percentage of white people who engage in violence against African Americans. (More common then either is intra-group violence from whites against whites or blacks against blacks.) What percentage of each group is acting out of racial animus I don’t know, and I don’t believe this is the proper consideration for the justice system, as I have repeatedly said. But at the very least your assertion is not self-evidently true.
This question has been answered multiple times, by several different posters.
It’s been answered zero times by no posters.
Have you tried reading the thread? The answers are right there.