Regular readers will know that I do not believe in either hate speech or hate crime as legal concepts. Any motivation, in the context of hate crimes, comes loaded with bias and opens the enforcement mechanisms in society to justify persecutions contrary to the purported purpose of adding “hate” to crime in the first place.
Related: Report That Declares Huge “Rise” in Hate Crimes in NH Leaves A lot of Details Out.
If you doubt me look across a political landscape. Hate, when defined by the state becomes as much an act of intimidation and persecution to suppress ideas or belief based on predetermined bias (political will or perception) as anything the State claims it intended to prevent.
The media misuses the term to grab headlines that smear people and destroy lives.
And law enforcement, well, they’re just people too.
We need to understand and accept this reality when it comes time to look at the annual Hate Crimes Data just released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Data they admit is neither conclusive nor suggestive of anything as I noted last year.
The FBI admits that the data is not just based on subjective declarations, there are frequent changes to reporting and collection that make year-to-year comparisons a challenge.
Valid assessments about crime, including hate crime, are possible only with careful study and analysis of the various conditions affecting each local law enforcement jurisdiction. (See Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics: Their Proper Use.) In addition, some data in this publication may not be comparable to those in prior editions of Hate Crime Statistics because of differing levels of participation from year to year.
And this is from the FBI’s 2017 notes regarding methodology.
Because motivation is subjective, it is sometimes difficult to know with certainty whether a crime resulted from the offender’s bias. Moreover, the presence of bias alone does not necessarily mean that a crime can be considered a hate crime. Only when a law enforcement investigation reveals sufficient evidence to lead a reasonable and prudent person to conclude that the offender’s actions were motivated, in whole or in part, by his or her bias, should an agency report an incident as a hate crime.
This is precisely the sort of language that leads me to conclude there is no such thing. Why?
Bias is determined by those investigating the scene who then decide whether circumstances could fit the current definition of what the FBI wants to see reported, or what they’ve been told is a local priority. This means that there is bias in the reporting of bias (in case it never occurred to you how obvious that problem would be), which isn’t the only reason the entire concept of hate crime designation is ridiculous.
It’s garbage.
But if it makes you feel any better this year’s garbage looks a lot better than last years garbage if we ignore the bais in the investigating, the reporting requirements, and the actual “evidence” leading to the results in the report.
“Conclusions” that results in headlines like this from the NH Patch: NH Hate Crimes Reported Cut By More Than 50 Percent: FBI Data
Hate crimes reported in New Hampshire were cut by more than half in 2017 as opposed to the year prior, according to FBI data released Tuesday. The sharp decrease comes as the nationwide number spiked by 17 percent.
It means nothing contextually speaking, just like my headline. Yes, the number generated last year that was obtained using different criteria from the year before was higher than this year which is also different from both previous years, all before we mix in changes in definitions, number of agencies reporting, human nature, subjectivity, and political will.
But, During the New Hampshire Republican Majority in a state that is 94% white, hate crimes…plummeted.
And that could be because of all the subjective reasons I’ve mentioned or the one I did not. There were incidents that fit this year’s definitions that were never reported.
None of it works. It doesn’t even work well. But that won’t stop them, and that’s the only thing on which you can count.
Related: You Can Start by Renaming the “White” Mountains
