Hate speech, including racially motivated derogatory names for people of difference as well as even speech that serves as an impetus for even the most heinous and dogmatic of social violence is protected, as is the right to assembly. (Walker, 1996, p
(Definition developed at the 1998 IACP Summit on Hate Crime in America)." (Turner, 2008)
Several of the arguments presented above, which distinguish hate crime from ordinary crime are retributive in nature. One opinion is that laws should exist concerning hate crimes because these offenses deserve worse penalties (Gerstenfeld, 2004)
The assumption is that the defendant had a bias motive for committing the offense and the motive consists solely of the defendant's thought. (Gellman, 1992)
Levin (1992, cited in Nolan & Akiyama, 1999) notes that police officers tend to identify crimes based on the severity of injury or the magnitude of property damage and not on the basis of motive. There are many thinkers and writers that question the legitimacy of hate or bias crime laws on the basis that they violate a fundamental democratic principle by punishing individuals for their prejudiced thoughts and beliefs (Altman, 2001)
It attempts to extend the civil rights paradigm into the field of criminal law. (Jacobs & Potter, 1998)
A. like the Alexandria case of a black man slitting the throat of a white eight-year-old boy to death while shouting racist epithets, a New York city attack of a white woman who was raped and anally raped while the black attacker called her racist names yet the police refused to label it hate crime, Kansas Ethiopian who shot dead two coworkers and killed himself leaving behind a three page literature that labeled whites as black blood sucker supreme white people yet it was not classified as hate crime (Loompanics Unlimited, 2001) these and many more cases did not receive wide media coverage neither did the civil right leaders and the politicians make much of them but left them to simmer to silence after a few convictions and being treated as normal crimes
With such high statistics, the media is tempted to concentrate where the news is at hence unintentionally ignoring the crime by blacks against the whites. However, considering further statistics provided by The Center for Healing Hearts and Spirit, (2011), it would be right to consider the media biased and not analytical of the statistics before they do their coverage
It has been an observed trend that crimes committed by African-Americans on whites are not given as much coverage and emphasis as those committed by whites against the African-Americans, though they could be of equal seriousness and driven by the same motive and produced same results. This can be said to be some racial stereotype, which is a fixed belief or idea that most people have about a given group of people or particular person or a given thing, though it may not be necessarily true or based on reality (Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, 2011)
" Further, the Bureau of Justice Administration (BJA; 1997) defines hate crimes as "Hate crimes -- or bias-motivated crimes -- are defined as offenses motivated by hatred against a victim based on his or her race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or national origin." (Religious Tolerance, 2011)
The statistics of crime rates is also another factor that makes it possible for the media to be tempted to focus on the crimes committed by the whites against the blacks. In 2007, the percentage of murder victims who were blacks stood at 43% (The Center for Healing Hearts and Spirit, 2011)
2). Many authorities agree, though, that the actual number of hate crimes that are committed in the United States each year is far higher than these statistics indicate because many such crimes go unreported (Dredge, 2009)
In addition, in 2007, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007 was proposed but remains pending review by the U.S. Congress (Lawrence, 2008)
(2009, p. 4) In addition, local police agencies can incorporate trend analysis of reported hate crime statistics to fine-tune their efforts in their communities (Meade, 2010)
There are several laws on the books, though, that mandate hate crime-related law enforcement and these are discussed further below. Controlling Legislation The history of hate crime-related legislation in the United States dates to the latter half of the 19th century, but more recently, the Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Hate Crime Prevention Act ("HCPA") was signed into law on October 29, 2009 by President Barack Obama (Simmons, 2012)
jpeg As shown in Figure 3 above, hate crimes are categorized as being the result of negative attitudes about sexual orientation, racial, ethnicity, gender identity, disability, and religious, in other words, the full spectrum of factors that can distinguish anyone from mainstream society. It is also noteworthy that many disabled people also report being the ongoing target of hate crimes (Stevens, 2011)
Although not always called such, hate crimes have always been a problem in the United States, these crimes did not become more frequent following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 to the surprise of many law enforcement authorities. For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) annual data concerning hate crime prevalence in the United States showed that in 2012, law enforcement agencies reported a total of 5,796 hate crimes versus 8,759 incidents in 1995, which was the first year these statistics were published by the FBI) (Trout, 2015)
The fact that the organized racist movement is made up primarily of men, is also an issue of gender." (Blazak and Perry 73) Although women make up a percentage of the population involved in hate groups, men are the main perpetrators and the main predators
2014 alone had 5,642 single-bias incidents reported. (FBI) Almost half of them (47%) were racially motivated
Another 11% of those crimes took place at schools and colleges, while 28% were widely distributed across different locations." (Partners against Hate) The main oppressors in hate crimes are white men