Adding the word hate to crime is a way for prosecutors to pile on charges in search of more significant fines and longer sentences. It is an injustice. Its other more critical function is to make people afraid to speak openly for fear of stumbling across the ever-moving hate speech trip wire, which is a social injustice. Canada is taking both to the extreme with a new law that would allow police to detain you on suspicion of a hate crime.
[I]f someone “fears” they may become a victim of a hate crime, they can go before a judge, who may summon the preemptively accused for a sort of precrime trial. If the judge finds “reasonable grounds” for the fear, the defendant must enter into “a recognizance.”
A recognizance is no mere promise to refrain from committing hate crimes. The judge may put the defendant under house arrest or electronic surveillance and order them to abstain from alcohol and drugs. Refusal to “enter the recognizance” for one year results in 12 months in prison.
It is a Red Flag law for speech and thought, and some suggest that Canada’s proximity to America is a warning. If they can do it there, they can do it here. I’m not saying they don’t want that, haven’t tried to get it, or would ever give up seeking such a thing. The First Amendment continues to be an enormous barrier to message control, and you can’t have proper despotism without that. They need the guns and the words, and they’ll work at it for another 100 years if they must, but sooner is better for those who would like to be tyrants now.
You would not be wrong to suggest we already have this in other forms. The criminal code is so crowded and convoluted that the presumption is that everyone is guilty of something; it is a matter of them seeing you as enough of a threat to bring you in and start piling up charges. Pre-crime, in this instance, is the assumption you are guilty at their convenience. But is that the same as predictive policing?
Person-based predictive policing began in 2009 as an attempt to apply a public health approach to violence. Just as epidemiological patterns reveal environmental toxins that can increase health risks (like getting cancer), criminal patterns can increase life risks (like getting shot). The key is to identify the predictive risk factors and try to remedy the underlying environmental causes.
In August 2017, I did a segment on Girard at Large with Manchester Police Chief Nick Willard (the guest host). In the segment before mine, he’d been talking about predictive policing and how, in theory, you could look at historical crime patterns for trends at times and places where, if you had officers present, crime might not repeat. My contribution to that was this. Having run restaurants for years, I told him you could predict customer flow based on an average of the past three years’ traffic and accurately determine staffing and product needed for this year. It’s not perfect. Other variables can intrude, but human nature seems to have proven the formula right. It occurred to me that this could apply to almost anything, including public safety.
Chief Willard was interested, maybe surprised, and he moved on, but my impression of the idea of predictive policing was not to arrest people in advance or even surveil them illegally. As an act of prevention, the city might have officers in areas where crime historically ramped up as a deterrent. Abuse, of course, is always a threat. Cities or states that allow drones or other warrantless surveillance will inevitably find someone doing something suspicious, another factor leading them to engage where no crime has occurred. Passing a pre-crime hate speech law hands the job to every Karen who has a grudge. It’s a bad idea and if you need proof, look at life under COVID. State and local governments had neighbors ratting each other out for having too many people over. Boards have citizens arrested for not wearing a mask. People in the grocery store lose their minds if you went the opposite direction of the arrows. It unnecessarily escalates tensions, leading to real hate and actual crime.
Let’s assume that’s the goal.
