Hate crime

[edit] Americola's celebrity biographies are provided by AmericolaWiki, a celebrity wiki. You can help contribute to Americola and edit this article.

This article (or section) may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article, especially its section layout, and relevant internal links. (help)
This article has been tagged since March 2007.

Hate crimes (also known as bias crimes) are violent crimes, hate speech or vandalism, motivated by feelings of enmity against an identifiable social group. Animosity towards the victims of hate crimes are often based on race, religion, sexual orientation, handicap, ethnicity, or national origin. Hate crimes differ from regular crime motivated by economic gain or personal animosity. In the United States, criminal acts motivated by bias can easily be confused with forms of expression protected by the U.S. Constitution.

1 History
2 How Hate Crimes Differ from Other Crimes
3 Causes and Characteristics of Hate Crimes
4 Hate Crime Victims
5 Hate Crime Perpetrators
6 Hate Crime Legislation
- 6.1 Arguments for hate crime legislation
- 6.2 Arguments against hate crimes legislation
7 See also
8 External links
9 News reports on recent alleged hate-crimes

History

Although hate crimes are increasingly prominent in the political agendas of policymakers at all levels of government in recent years, the phenomenon is not new. Examples from the past include Roman persecution of Christians and the Nazi “final solution” for the Jews, and more recently, the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and genocide in Rwanda. Hate crimes have shaped and sometimes defined world history. In the United States, racial and religious biases largely have inspired most hate crimes. As Europeans began to colonize the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries, Native Americans increasingly became the targets of bias-motivated intimidation and violence. During the past two centuries, some of the more typical examples of hate crimes in the US include lynchings of African Americans, cross burnings to drive Black families from predominantly White neighborhoods, assaults on homosexuals, and the painting of swastikas on Jewish synagogues.[1]

How Hate Crimes Differ from Other Crimes

The number of hate crimes may seem small when compared with the incidence of other types of crimes. For example, during 1993 in the United States, 11 of the 24,526 murders reported in the United States were classified as hate crimes, as were 13 of the 104,806 reported rapes. However, hate crimes are considered to victimize not only the immediate target but every member of the group that the immediate target represents. A bias-motivated offense can cause a broad ripple of discomfiture among members of a targeted group, and a violent hate crime can act like a virus, quickly spreading feelings of terror and loathing across an entire community. Apart from their psychological impacts, violent hate crimes can create tides of retaliation and counterretaliation. Therefore, criminal acts motivated by bias may carry far more weight than other types of criminal acts.

Causes and Characteristics of Hate Crimes

Many factors may create a climate in which people, motivated by their biases, take criminal action. Such factors include poor or uncertain economic conditions, racial stereotypes in films and on television, hate-filled discourse on talk shows or in political advertisements, the use of racial code language such as “welfare mothers” and “inner city thugs,” and an individual’s personal experiences with members of particular minority groups. Once a climate of hate is created, a single incident—such as the videotaped beating of Los Angeles, California, motorist Rodney King—can trigger a wave of hate crimes.

Hate Crime Victims

In the United States, African-Americans, who constitute the single largest minority group, are more likely to be targets of hate crimes than members of any other group. Of the nearly 8,000 hate crimes reported in 1995, almost 3,000 of them were motivated by bias against African Americans. Other typical victims are Jews, homosexuals, Muslims, and, increasingly, Asian Americans.

Hate Crime Perpetrators

Most hate crimes are committed not by members of an organized hate group but by individual citizens. Some perpetrators resent the growing economic power of a particular racial or ethnic group and engage in “scapegoating”; others react to a perceived threat to the safety and property value of their neighborhood. Still other offenders include “thrill seekers”--those who randomly target interchangeable representatives of minority groups for harassment and violence, and “mission offenders,” those who believe they are on a mission to rid the world of some perceived evil. This last group accounts for a tiny percentage of bias-motivated offenders. The majority of offenders—and passive observers—are merely individuals who believe racial and ethnic stereotypes and act on spur-of-the-moment impulses. Frequently alcohol or drug use is a factor in the commission of hate crimes.

Hate Crime Legislation

Many nations, and many states in the United States, have passed legislation that particularly penelizes hate crimes.

Arguments for hate crime legislation

Arguments for hate crime laws tend to center on the notion that, when an offender has a biased motive, that offender’s crime should carry a more severe penalty because the injury suffered by the victim and by society is greater. Proponents believe that hate crime statutes do not conflict with the tenets of the first amendment because they do not punish an individual for exercising freedom of expression but rather for motivation for engaging in criminal activity, a factor often considered when evaluating the seriousness of an offense. It is said that, when the core of a person’s identity is attacked, the degradation and dehumanization is especially severe, and additional emotional and physiological problems are likely to result. Society then, in turn, can suffer from the disempowerment of a group of people. Furthermore, it is asserted that the chances for retaliatory crimes are greater when a hate crime has been committed. The riots in Los Angeles, California, that followed the beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, by a group of white police officers are cited as support for this argument.[2]

When it enacted the Hate Crimes Act of 2000, the New York State Legislature included legislative findings that offer a survey of the various arguments for hate crime legislation. The legislature specifically found that:

"Hate crimes do more than threaten the safety and welfare of all citizens. They inflict on victims incalculable physical and emotional damage and tear at the very fabric of free society. Crimes motivated by invidious hatred toward particular groups not only harm individual victims but send a powerful message of intolerance and discrimination to all members of the group to which the victim belongs. Hate crimes can and do intimidate and disrupt entire communities and vitiate the civility that is essential to healthy democratic processes. In a democratic society, citizens cannot be required to approve of the beliefs and practices of others, but must never commit criminal acts on account of them. Current law does not adequately recognize the harm to public order and individual safety that hate crimes cause. Therefore, our laws must be strengthened to provide clear recognition of the gravity of hate crimes and the compelling importance of preventing their recurrence. Accordingly, the legislature finds and declares that hate crimes should be prosecuted and punished with appropriate severity." [3]

Arguments against hate crimes legislation

Arguments against hate crime legislation tend to center on the assertion that current laws already cover crimes that would be prosecuted under hate crime legislation, the difficulty or possible injustice in enforcement, possible violation of freedom of thought or speech (First Amendment rights in the US), the possibility that future governments might twist hate crime legislation to hurt their political opponents, and the possibility of politicizing the law. Some examples are:

It is costly and difficult to prove hatred as a motivation.[4]
Judges or juries are allowed to use subjective reasons to penalize a person, a power that could be used for injustice.[5].
Although arguments for hate crime legislation rely on arguments of harm to an entire group, rather than just one individual, this harm is only presumed, and not proven, and therefore, a criminal could be penalized for an unproven (and unprovable) crime.[6]
An argument for hate crime legislation is that such crimes victimize an entire group through intimidation and disruption. However, any crime harms people beyond the immediate victim, for example, those living in the neighborhood where a serious crime was committed would likely suffer intimidation and disruption.
Overtime, hate crime laws and associated case law could evolve to the point speaking out strongly against a particular group or its actions could be construed as a libelous hate crime, violating First Amendment Rights.[7]
Although hate crimes are currently meant to protect previously abused minorities, a shift in public opinion or political orthodoxy could cause those same laws to be used as a weapon against them. A precedent of laws that do not favor all groups and actions equally could allow the criminal justice system to be taken over by whatever group is in power.
Hate crime laws are intended to protect minority groups, yet any majority can be easily divided into subsets that are minorities, for example, Caucasians into Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, and so forth, rendering the concept of protection for minority groups meaningless under a changed political climate.[8]
The concept of hate crimes criminalizes thought by increasing the penalty for crimes based on the motive for committing those crimes. The deliberation or premeditation that distinguishes, for example, first-degree murder from second-degree murder, may be held as an example that to a certain degree, thought is already criminalized. However, some argue that premeditation is concomitant with a premeditated crime. Motive, however, whether it be hate, jealousy, greed, or passion, is not part of a crime in the same manner. For example, individuals discussing their hatred of a social group with each other are not committing conspiracy, while those same individuals plotting to rob a bank are.
From a utilitarian perspective, individual deterrence is unlikely to be achieved over an entrenched social conscience. Rather than deterring crime, the concept of hate crime may have the opposite effect of enraging individuals psychologically susceptible to developing anger and hatred to others amidst a domination complex.^{[citation needed]}