Soccer Dad

Hate Crime Statistics

There have been a number of blogs that have discussed hate crimes and antisemitism recently. So I've gone back to the FBI's hate crime statistics.
David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy has written about antisemitism.
Using the FBI's statistics for the year 2000 you see that in 2000 there were 1161 anti-Jewish crimes (one of the 19 hate related murders was of a Jew). By comparison there were 3409 anti-Black hate crimes. (3 of those were murders.) What's interesting 2000 there were approximately 6,136,000 Jewish Americans; there were 34,658,190 Black Americans. Given that the Black population was roughly 5.5 times the Jewish population and the hate crimes suffered by Blacks were roughly 2 times more than those suffered by Jews it is clear that Jews suffer higher percentage of hate crimes than do Blacks - by a factor of about 2.75.
Hube's Cube and Anne Althouse have recently weighed in on the controversy of whether the killing of Matthew Shepard was indeed a hate crime. Apparently his killer was high on methadone, a drug that causes violent rages. In his memory HBO publicized "The Laramie Project" to "...to shed light on a western town's loss of innocence." The town of Laramie became identified with a hate crime and, by association, so did the state of Wyoming. But if you look at the FBI's hate crime statistics for 1998, you find that there were only 6 hate crimes in Wyoming for the whole year. Given the population of Wyoming at the time which was 266627, roughly 1/811 of the population of the United States in 1998, you would have expected about 9.5 hate crimes. So proportionately too (not just absolutely), by this standard, Wyoming would have to be considered a tolerant. In 1997 there were 7 hate crimes in Wyoming and in 199 there were two. And of those, none were murders.
After the 2000 election, Paul Begala went of on a rant (described here; the link to the original article doesn't seem to work) about the red of the red states represented the blood of those killed by hate crimes. But using his dichotomy it's interesting to note that the blue state of California accounting for roughly 15 percent of the population accounted for 1749 of 7755 or 22 percent of all hate crimes for 1998.
Jame Q Wilson observed:

California authorities reason that it is important to impose these special penalties because violent crimes aimed at members of a specified group inflict greater injury on society than does "randomly inflicted violent crime." Really? All of these years I had let myself be persuaded that what actually frightened Americans was our high murder rate, almost all of which is anything but random in the sense that it is chiefly aimed at lovers, rival drug dealers, drunken enemies, and the like. The California deep thinkers imagine that having 20,000 homicides a year in America is less important than the unknown, but quite small and almost surely declining, number of hate murders.

. Dave Huber made similar observations here.
"Hate crimes" is a category of violence so designated as a sign of the majority's intolerance of various minorities. By designating some crimes as "hate crimes" it creates the opportunity to "do something" about the problem. It allows a selective reading of the data to reinforce a false received wisdom. But there are few, if any, countries where the majority is as solicitous of its minorities as it is here. To overplay hate crimes is to sow divisiveness where friendship and comity should be celebrated.
But the problem may not be as significant as many think. Certainly if "hate crimes" are a problem in the United States, Jews are under a greater threat than any other religious or ethnic group, yet when is the last time the New York Times featured a major expose on the problem of American antisemitism? It regularly features articles on anti-Black prejudice; running a series about "How Race is Lived in America" a few years ago.
Similarly a closer look at the data shows that the supposedly "less tolerant" states demonstrate less hatred than do the more "diverse" states. Motivation really shouldn't be an important factor in classifying a crime unless it suggests some sort of larger conspiracy. Hate crime statistics may yield some interesting results (yes there was a rise in anti-Islamic hate crimes post 2001, but the number remains quite low; even considering the Muslim share of America's population) but too often they are recklessly wielded to promote an agenda.

Posted by SoccerDad at November 29, 2004 04:57 AM | TrackBack