Teaching and Learning Guide for: Isn’t Every Crime a Hate Crime? The Case for Hate Crime Laws

Supporters of hate crime legislation suggest that the primary reason for the codification of hate crime laws is “to send a strong message of tolerance and equality, signaling to all members of society that hatred and prejudice on the basis of identity will be punished with extra severity.” However, hate crime laws may actually be accomplishing the opposite effect of tolerance and equality because they encourage U.S. citizens to view themselves, not as members of our society, but as members of a protected group. The enactment of hate crime legislation at the federal and state levels has led to unintended consequences and unfair practices. Today, the controversy regarding the effectiveness of hate crime laws is debated, and people question whether this type of legislation is beneficial to society. This article will candidly reevaluate hate crime legislation. Part II will provide the definition of the term “hate crime” and the theoretical justification for enhanced sentencing involving discrimination-based conduct. Focus will be placed on data that disproves the theory that hate crime laws reduce or deter future hate crimes. It will also explain the underlying reasons for the enactment of hate crime laws, such as the media’s role and political influences, and it will present several of the misconceptions associated with hate crime legislation. Part III will present the unintended consequences associated with the enactment of hate crime statutes, including constitutional violations. It will also explain why hate crimes are rarely prosecuted, and will focus on the inconsistency, redundancy, and arbitrary usage/application of hate crime legislation. Part III will also present an individual’s response to the negative, unintended effects of hate crime legislation. Part IV will determine that hate crime legislation is not cost-effective. Part V sets forth a recommendation on improving community efforts to educate or reeducate citizens on respecting diversity. Finally, the article analyzes hate crime laws from supporting and opposing viewpoints and concludes that there is no need to separate hate crimes from other types of crimes as a means to promote a more tolerant, equal, and stable society.

Many Confederate monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era, sending symbolic messages of intimidation and hostility to the Black population. Yet no studies have examined the relationship between contemporary Confederate memorialization and bias crime. Drawing from research on hate crime law compliance, we posit an inverse relationship between Confederate monuments and mobilization of hate crime law, such that compliance with hate crime laws will be lower in communities with memorialization, but that among complying agencies, anti-Black hate crime rates will be higher. To examine these relationships, we combined data from the Uniform Crime Report Hate Crime Statistics and the American Community Survey with Confederate monument data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. We conducted analyses predicting a) monument presence, b) agency non-compliance, and c) anti-Black hate crime. Results indicate that monuments are located in communities exemplifying a challenge to racial hierarchies: economically advantaged communities with larger Black populations. Regarding hate crime, analyses show that (1) the American South is associated with reduced compliance, and, (2) after accounting for compliance, Confederate memorialization is associated with increased anti-Black hate crime. These findings have implications for intergroup conflict and the impact of local symbolism on the formal mobilization of hate crime law.

Mapping crime – Hate crimes and hate groups in the USA: A spatial analysis with gridded data

Hate crime policy has developed from the early legislation of the 1968 Civil Rights Act to the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act, to be increasingly inclusive in terms of identity and comprehensive in terms of ramifications. Hence a body of scholarship around the trajectory and implications of hate crime laws has developed, as has a robust discourse on the definitions of hate crime itself and theories on who perpetrates bias-motivated violence and why it occurs. Between definitions of hate crime, a tension exists between legal definitions and those of theorists who are attempting incorporate understanding of context into the definition. Similarly, the theories on who perpetrates hate crimes and why they occur exhibit tensions between strain-based theories. While some scholars have deployed Merton’s (1938) strain theory associated with societal anomie, others point to changing norms. As hate crime laws have become more inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression, avenues of research into the disparities in experience of bias-motivated crimes between enumerated categories has increased. Persistent in the research on hate crime is the deficiency of data on victimization and ramifications beyond direct victims. While data on the scope of the policies is clear, inconsistencies in data collection around victimization render available resources insufficient. Most recently, research on hate crime policy has intersected with queer theory to question whether hate crime laws are positive for the LGBTQ community or society at large. Organizations such as the Silvia Rivera Law Project, for example, have pushed back on calls for inclusive hate crime laws via challenging the propensity to provide additional resources to the prison-industrial complex. Furthermore, queer scholars of history find a disconnect between the origins of the LGBTI movement in resisting police powers to be antithetical to promoting increased police powers in the form of hate crime legislation.

Hate crimes are offenses committed against an individual or an individual's property because of an offender's bias toward the individual's actual or perceived characteristic (e.g., the individual's race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.). Hate crime laws exist to protect people who have been targeted solely because of their membership within a legally protected category; these categories generally include groups that have been historically oppressed within the larger society. The use of specific hate crime laws varies around the world, as do the arguments for and against the development and implementation of such laws. Organized hate groups are often perceived to be the perpetrators of hate crimes, yet research indicates that typical offenders are more likely to be labeled as thrill seekers and not necessarily members of a formal hate group.

This study investigated how racial prejudice influences White college students' perceptions of hate crime. We also examined the moderating effects of the race of the victim of hate crimes and the absence of hate crime laws. Our sample included 581 White students in a predominantly White university located in a state that does not have a hate crime law. The study was set up in a 2 (race of the victim and the perpetrator) × 3 (level of assault) factorial design. Participants rated their perceptions of three scenarios (i.e., non-racially biased simple assault, racially biased simple assault, and racially biased aggravated assault). The dependent variables were perceptions of hate crime and willingness to report. The key independent variable was participants' level of racial prejudice. The moderators included race of the victim in each scenario and whether participants' state of origin has a hate crime law. Results suggest that higher levels of modern racism were associated with lower perceptions of hate crime and lower willingness to report racially biased simple and aggravated hate crime. When the victim was White, participants with higher levels of racial prejudice were more likely to perceive a hate crime and more willing to report it. The opposite was true when the victim was Black. The absence of state hate crime laws and race of victim were significant moderators. Our study suggests that racial prejudice is associated with lower perceptions of hate crime and willingness to report. Furthermore, the moderating effect of the race of victims provides insights on how racial prejudice can lead to a differential perception of hate crime, depending on whether one's racial in-group is targeted. Our findings also highlight the importance of having state-level hate crime laws to mitigate the linkage between modern racism and perceptions of hate crime.

Much of the scholarly debate about hate crime laws focuses on a discussion of their constitutionality under the First Amendment. Part of larger empirical study of police methods of investigating hate crimes, this Note attempts to shift thinking in this area beyond the existing debate over the constitutionality of hate crime legislation to a discussion of how low-level criminal justice personnel, such as the police, enforce hate crime laws. This Note argues that, since hate crimes are an area in which police have great discretion in enforcing the law, their understanding of the First Amendment and how it relates to their job is important to the impact that hate crime legislation has in the community. Additionally, research on the enforcement of hate crime laws may inspire further investigation of the broad discretion police officers currently possess in all areas of law.

This paper aims to examine the significance of xenophobia and hate crimes in multicultural societies. It begins with outlining the general discussions about multiculturalism, xenophobia and hate crimes. It identifies hate crimes that related to xenophobia in multicultural society and introduces hate crime laws in Australia. While Australian multicultural policy has its roots in government responses to the post settlement issues facing migrants, through the 1980s and 1990s policy was articulated more broadly as an element of Australia's nation building narratives. Today all Australian States and Territories have active policies and programs dealing with multiculturalism. As other multicultural societies, Australia confronts with challenges in building a multicultural society. One of them is xenophobia and hate crimes related to race, ethnic, religions. A number of common law countries have introduced legislation designed to respond to the problem of prejudice-related crime, commonly referred to as hate crime law. Whilst the heavier penalties imposed by hate crime laws are designed to denounce, and thereby deter, prejudice-related violence, it is apparent that these laws are meant to do more than punish and deter. They aim to condemn, not just criminal conduct per se, but also racism, homophobia, religious intolerance and the like. In this way Australia seek to make a broad moral claim that prejudice is wrong and to thereby reinforce pro-social values of tolerance and respect for marginalized and disadvantaged groups. This paper argues that hate crime laws are necessary in order to prevent hate crimes related to multiculturalism and suggests that Australian hate crime laws can be implied to sustain multiculturalism in Korea.

Hate crimes have been found to have more severe consequences than other parallel crimes that were not motivated by the offenders' hostility toward someone because of their real or perceived difference. Many countries today have hate crime laws that make it possible to increase the penalties for such crimes. The main critique against hate crime laws is that they punish thoughts. Instead, proponents of hate crime laws argue that sentence enhancement is justified because hate crimes cause greater harm. This study compares consequences of victimization across groups of victims to test for whom hate crimes hurt more. We analyzed data that were collected through questionnaires distributed to almost 3,000 students at Malmö University, Sweden, during 2013. The survey focused on students' exposure to, and experiences of, hate crime. A series of separate logistic regression analyses were performed, which analyzed the likelihood for reporting consequences following a crime depending on crime type, perceived motive, repeat victimization, gender, and age. Analyzed as one victim group, victims of hate crime more often reported any of the consequences following a crime compared with victims of parallel non-hate-motivated crimes. And, overall victims of threat more often reported consequences compared with victims of sexual harassment and minor assault. However, all hate crime victim groups did not report more consequences than the non-hate crime victim group. The results provide grounds for questioning that hate crimes hurt the individual victim more. It seems that hate crimes do not hurt all more but hate crimes hurt some victims of some crimes more in some ways.

This work addresses a central question in both social problems theory and sociolegal studies: how can we understand and account for the content of legal categories that define social problems and attendant victims? It offers an empirical analysis of the emergence and evolution of federal hate crime laws—the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, the Violence Against Women Act, and the Rate Crimes Penalty Enhancement Act—that determine who is and is not eligible for hate crime victim status. By examining the legislative histories of these laws as evidence of “critical discursive moments” (Gamson 1992), I show how the substantive character of the law was shaped over time: 1 first establish a historical context for federal hate crime law: then I analyze how an important element hate crime law—the adoption of select status provisions, such as race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and disabilities—unfolded such that some victims of discriminatory violence have been recognized as hate crime victims while others have gone unnoticed. In particular, people of color, Jews, gays and lesbians, women, and those with disabilities increasingly have been recognized as victims of hate crime, while union members, the elderly, children, and police officers, for example, have not. The findings suggest that the content of federal hate crime law was shaped by a series of temporally bound institutionally qualified processes whereby: 1) the empirical credibility of the scope of hate crime as a social problem was established by the claimsmaking of established social movement organizations; 2) a trio of core provisions for hate crime law—race, religion, and ethnicity—was cemented as the anchoring provisions of all hate crime law through discursive strategies that rendered particular types of violence empirically credible and worthy of federal attention; 3) the domain of the law expanded to include additional provisions, most notably sexual orientation and gender, in qualitatively distinct ways; and 4) the increased differentiation of legal subjects in subsequent law occurred in ways consistent with previously established and institutionalized policy pedigrees. Taken together, these findings reveal how microlevel processes of categorization work, mesolevel processes of social movement mobilization, and larger processes of institutionalization interface as political actors create and coalesce around legal meanings that define both “condition-categories” and “people-categories” (Loseke 1993).

This paper uses conceptual economics to analyze the nationwide demand for hatred nurtured by political divisiveness and conflicts in the United States. The study asserts that politicians from the Democratic and Republican Parties are the prime suppliers of hatred that hate groups willfully consume to reveal their preference for overt racial-gender hatred and that the hate crime laws or the legal penalties of hate crimes may have altered the dynamics of hatred and hate crimes in both directions in the United States. In the current political environment, the consensus among political pundits and legal scholars is that the 45th President of the United States could be considered as one of the largest suppliers of conspiracy theories and disinformation used to nurture hate-creating stories and false narratives that many hate groups consumed nationwide thus their revealed preference for overt hatred and hate crimes. The aggregate demand for hatred depends on the legal penalty paid for hatred and the continuous hatred signals received from political leaders such as the 45th POTUS.

Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy

Hate crimes are crimes that are motivated by personal prejudice or bias. Hate-crime laws criminalise such conduct and allow for the imposition of aggravated penalties on convicted perpetrators. This article examines the historical, social and political factors which influenced the shaping and enactment of the first British hate-crime law. The South African context is also considered since the Department of Justice has recently released the Prevention and Combatting of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill for public commentary and input. While Britain has had a long historical record of criminal conduct that was motivated by the race and the ethnicity of victims, it was only in the twentieth century that civil society first drew attention to the problem of violent racist crimes. Nevertheless, successive British governments denied the problem of racist crimes and refused to consider the enactment of a hate-crime law. Following a high-profile racist murder and a governmental inquiry, a British Labour Party-led government eventually honoured its pre-election commitment and passed a hate-crime law in 1998. Some parallels are apparent between the British and the South African contexts. South Africa also has a long historical record of racially motivated hate crimes. Moreover, in the post-apartheid era there have been numerous reports of racist hate crimes and hate crimes against Black lesbian women and Black foreigners. Despite several appeals from the academic and non-governmental sectors for the enactment of a hate-crime law, and the circulation for public commentary of the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill, such a law has hitherto not been enacted in South Africa. This article posits that the enactment of a hate-crime law is a constitutional imperative in South Africa in terms of the right to equality and the right to freedom and security of the person. While the enactment of a hate-crime law in South Africa is recommended, it is conceded that enacting a hate-crime law will not eradicate criminal conduct motivated by prejudice and bias.

ObjectiveRecent events (e.g., Brexit) have highlighted how globalization may foster hostility toward out‐groups in developed democracies. Is trade competition systematically related to hate in the United States?MethodsI conduct a county‐level statistical analysis using data from the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, the FBI's Hate Crime Statistics database, and the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate group map over the period of 2003–2017.ResultsCounties with more trade‐related layoffs tend to have more hate groups, though not hate crimes, even after accounting for changes in unemployment rates. The relationship between trade layoffs and hate groups is strongest in counties that have recently experienced larger decreases in the share of the white population.ConclusionsAlthough existing studies on diffuse economic vulnerability and hate find a weak connection between economic factors and hate, trade layoffs can explain some variation in local hate group activity.

This article discusses how maximising freedom of expression increases both liberty and equality. The article focuses on the rationale that is used by many western societies to enact laws to prevent what is termed a ‘hate crime’. A hate crime is usually defined as an offence that is motivated by an offender's beliefs about an immutable characteristic of the victim, such as race, sex, religion, or national origin. The proponents of hate crime laws often believe that restraints on expression, such as racist speech, are justified as a means by which to reduce bigotry and its by product ‐ discrimination. However, in this article, the author concludes that hate crime laws actually diminish liberty and equality and adversely affect a vastly disproportionate number of minority group members. Indeed, actually, hate crime laws may promote a perception of inequality, because they permit more severe punishments for offenders solely on the basis of the race, sex, religion, or national origin of offenders’ victims.