Hate crimes in the United States
Encyclopedia
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
, ethnicity, nationality
Nationality
Nationality is membership of a nation or sovereign state, usually determined by their citizenship, but sometimes by ethnicity or place of residence, or based on their sense of national identity....
, gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
, sexual orientation
Sexual orientation
Sexual orientation describes a pattern of emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to the opposite sex, the same sex, both, or neither, and the genders that accompany them. By the convention of organized researchers, these attractions are subsumed under heterosexuality, homosexuality,...
, gender identity
Gender identity
A gender identity is the way in which an individual self-identifies with a gender category, for example, as being either a man or a woman, or in some cases being neither, which can be distinct from biological sex. Basic gender identity is usually formed by age three and is extremely difficult to...
, and disability
Disability
A disability may be physical, cognitive, mental, sensory, emotional, developmental or some combination of these.Many people would rather be referred to as a person with a disability instead of handicapped...
. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)/FBI, as well as campus security authorities, are required to collect and publish hate crime statistics.
1964 Federal Civil Rights Law
The 1964 Federal Civil Rights Law, (b)(2), permits federal prosecution of anyone who "willingly injures, intimidates or interferes with another person, or attempts to do so, by force because of the other person's race, color, religion or national origin" http://www.justice.gov/crt/crim/245.php because of the victim's attempt to engage in one of six types of federally protected activities, such as attending school, patronizing a public place/facility, applying for employment, acting as a juror in a state court or voting.Persons violating the 1969 Federal Hate Crimes Law face a fine or imprisonment of up to one year, or both. If bodily injury results or if such acts of intimidation involve the use of firearms, explosives or fire, individuals can receive prison terms of up to 10 years, while crimes involving kidnapping, sexual assault, or murder can be punishable by life in prison or the death penalty. U.S. district Courts provide for criminal sanctions only. The Violence Against Women Act
Violence Against Women Act
The Violence Against Women Act of 1994 is a United States federal law. It was passed as Title IV, sec. 40001-40703 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, , and signed as by President Bill Clinton on September 13, 1994...
of 1994 contained a provision at which allowed victims of gender-motivated hate crimes to seek "compensatory and punitive damages, injunctive and declaratory relief, and such other relief as a court may deem appropriate", but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Morrison
United States v. Morrison
United States v. Morrison, is a United States Supreme Court decision which held that parts of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 were unconstitutional because they exceeded congressional power under the Commerce Clause and under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.-...
that the provision is unconstitutional.
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994)
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement ActViolent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, , , was an act of Congress dealing with crime and law enforcement that became law in 1994. It is the largest crime bill in the history of the US at 356 pages and will provide for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and...
, enacted in note Sec. 280003, requires the United States Sentencing Commission
United States Sentencing Commission
The United States Sentencing Commission is an independent agency of the judicial branch of the federal government of the United States. It is responsible for articulating the sentencing guidelines for the United States federal courts...
to increase the penalties for hate crimes committed on the basis of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, or gender of any person. In 1995, the Sentencing Commission implemented these guidelines, which only apply to federal crime
Federal crime
In the United States, a federal crime or federal offense is a crime that is made illegal by U.S. federal legislation. In the United States, criminal law and prosecution happen at both the federal and the state levels; thus a “federal crime” is one that is prosecuted under federal criminal law, and...
s.
Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act
On October 28, 2009 President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, attached to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010
The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 is a law in the United States signed by President Barack Obama on October 28, 2009. As a bill it was H.R. 2647 in the 111th Congress...
, which expanded existing United States federal hate crime law to apply to crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability, and dropped the prerequisite that the victim be engaging in a federally protected activity.
State laws
45 states and the District of Columbia have statutes criminalizing various types of bias-motivated violence or intimidation (the exceptions are ARArkansas
Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River...
, GA
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
, whose hate crime statute was struck down by the Georgia Supreme Court in 2004, IN
Indiana
Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...
, SC
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
, and WY
Wyoming
Wyoming is a state in the mountain region of the Western United States. The western two thirds of the state is covered mostly with the mountain ranges and rangelands in the foothills of the Eastern Rocky Mountains, while the eastern third of the state is high elevation prairie known as the High...
). Each of these statutes covers bias on the basis of race, religion, and ethnicity; 32 cover disability
Disability hate crime
Disability hate crime is hate crime arising from the hostility of the perpetrator towards the disability, or perceived disability, of the victim, or because of their perceived connection to disability...
; 31 of them cover sexual orientation; 28 cover gender; 14 cover transgender/gender-identity; 13 cover age; 5 cover political affiliation. and 3 along with Washington, D.C. cover homelessness.
31 states and the District of Columbia have statutes creating a civil cause of action
Legal liability
Legal liability is the legal bound obligation to pay debts.* In law a person is said to be legally liable when they are financially and legally responsible for something. Legal liability concerns both civil law and criminal law. See Strict liability. Under English law, with the passing of the Theft...
, in addition to the criminal penalty, for similar acts.
27 states and the District of Columbia have statutes requiring the state to collect hate crime statistics; 16 of these cover sexual orientation.
Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990
The Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990Hate Crime Statistics Act
The Hate Crime Statistics Act, , passed in 1990, requires the Attorney General to collect data on crimes committed because of the victim's race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. The bill was signed into law by George H. W...
, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2004/appendix_a.htm requires the Attorney General
United States Attorney General
The United States Attorney General is the head of the United States Department of Justice concerned with legal affairs and is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government. The attorney general is considered to be the chief lawyer of the U.S. government...
to collect data on crimes committed because of the victim's race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. The bill was signed into law in 1990 by George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 41st President of the United States . He had previously served as the 43rd Vice President of the United States , a congressman, an ambassador, and Director of Central Intelligence.Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, to...
, and was the first federal statute to "recognize and name gay, lesbian and bisexual people." Since 1992, the Department of Justice and the FBI have jointly published an annual report on hate crime statistics.
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994
In 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act expanded the scope to include crimes based on disabilityDisability hate crime
Disability hate crime is hate crime arising from the hostility of the perpetrator towards the disability, or perceived disability, of the victim, or because of their perceived connection to disability...
, and the FBI began collecting data on disability bias crimes on January 1, 1997. In 1996, Congress permanently reauthorized the Act.
Campus Hate Crimes Right to Know Act of 1997
The Campus Hate Crimes Right to Know Act of 1997 enacted (f)(1)(F)(ii), which requires campus security authorities to collect and report data on hate crimes committed on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or disability.Prevalence of hate crimes
The DOJ and the FBI have gathered statistics on hate crimes reported to law enforcement since 1992 in accordance with the Hate Crime Statistics ActHate Crime Statistics Act
The Hate Crime Statistics Act, , passed in 1990, requires the Attorney General to collect data on crimes committed because of the victim's race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. The bill was signed into law by George H. W...
. The FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division
Criminal Justice Information Services Division
The Criminal Justice Information Services Division is a division of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation . The CJIS was established in February 1992 and it is the largest division in the FBI....
has annually published these statistics as part of its Uniform Crime Reporting
Uniform Crime Reports
The Uniform Crime Reports are published by the United States Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting Program...
program. According to these reports, of the over 113,000 hate crimes since 1991, 55% were motivated by racial bias, 17% by religious bias, 14% sexual orientation bias, 14% ethnicity bias, and 1% disability bias.
| Bias Motive | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Race | 6,438 | 6,994 | 6,084 | 5,514 | 5,485 | 5,397 | 5,545 | 4,580 | 4,754 | 5,119 | 4,895 | 5,020 | 4,956 | 4,934 |
| Religion | 1,617 | 1,535 | 1,586 | 1,720 | 1,686 | 1,699 | 2,118 | 1,659 | 1,489 | 1,586 | 1,405 | 1,750 | 1,628 | 1,732 |
| Sexual Orientation | 1,347 | 1,281 | 1,401 | 1,488 | 1,558 | 1,558 | 1,664 | 1,513 | 1,479 | 1,482 | 1,213 | 1,472 | 1,512 | 1,706 |
| Ethnicity/National Origin | 1,044 | 1,207 | 1,132 | 956 | 1,040 | 1,216 | 2,634 | 1,409 | 1,326 | 1,254 | 1,228 | 1,305 | 1,347 | 1,226 |
| Disability | unknown | unknown | 12 | 27 | 23 | 36 | 37 | 50 | 43 | 73 | 54 | 95 | 84 | 85 |
| Single-Bias | 10,446 | 11,017 | 9,851 | 9705 | 9,792 | 9,906 | 11,998 | 9,211 | 9,091 | 9,514 | 8,795 | 9,642 | 9,527 | 9,683 |
| Multiple-Bias | 23 | 22 | 40 | 17 | 10 | 18 | 22 | 11 | 9 | 14 | 9 | 10 | 8 | 8 |
| Total | 10,469 | 11,039 | 10,255 | 9,722 | 9,802 | 9,924 | 12,020 | 9,222 | 9,100 | 9,528 | 8,804 | 9,652 | 9,535 | 9,691 |
| Offense type | Hate Crimes | All US Crimes |
|---|---|---|
| Murder and non-negligent manslaughter | 7 | 16,272 |
| Forcible rape | 11 | 89,000 |
| Robbery | 145 | 441,855 |
| Aggravated assault | 1,025 | 834,885 |
| Burglary | 158 | 2,222,196 |
| Larceny-theft | 224 | 6,588,873 |
| Motor vehicle theft | 26 | 956,846 |
Deliberate attacks on the homeless as hate crimes
Florida, Maine, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. have hate crime laws that include the homeless status of an individual.A 2007 study found that the number of violent crimes against the homeless is increasing. The rate of such documented crimes in 2005 was 30% higher than of those in 1999. 75% of all perpetrators are under the age of 25. Studies and surveys indicate that homeless people have a much higher criminal victimization rate than the non-homeless, but that most incidents never get reported to authorities.
In recent years, largely due to the efforts of the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) and academic researchers the problem of violence against the homeless has gained national attention. The NCH called deliberate attacks against the homeless hate crimes in their report Hate, Violence, and Death on Mainstreet USA (they retain the definition of the American Congress).
The Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University
California State University
The California State University is a public university system in the state of California. It is one of three public higher education systems in the state, the other two being the University of California system and the California Community College system. It is incorporated as The Trustees of the...
, San Bernardino in conjunction with the NCH found that 155 homeless people were killed by non-homeless people in "hate killings", while 76 people were killed in all the other traditional hate crime homicide
Homicide
Homicide refers to the act of a human killing another human. Murder, for example, is a type of homicide. It can also describe a person who has committed such an act, though this use is rare in modern English...
categories such as race and religion, combined. The CSHE contends that negative and degrading portrayals of the homeless contribute to a climate where violence takes place.
Hate crime laws debate
Penalty-enhancement hate crime laws are traditionally justified on the grounds that, in Chief Justice RehnquistWilliam Rehnquist
William Hubbs Rehnquist was an American lawyer, jurist, and political figure who served as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States and later as the 16th Chief Justice of the United States...
's words, "this conduct is thought to inflict greater individual and societal harm.... bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest."
Some people object to penalty-enhancement and federal prosecution laws because they believe they offer preferred protection to certain individuals over others. There is less opposition to data collection statutes.
Classification of crimes committed against white people
Donald Altschiller, librarian at Boston UniversityBoston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
, asserts that hate crimes against white people are hate crimes as much as any other. "Hate crime laws are colorblind.", he states. Although there are fewer hate crimes directed against white people than against other groups, they do occur and are prosecuted. Hate crime statistics published in 2002, gathered by the FBI under the auspices of the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, documented over 7,000 hate crime incidents, in roughly one-fifth of which the victims were white people. However, these statistics have caused dispute. The FBI's hate crimes statistics for 1993, which similarly reported 20% of all hate crimes to be committed against white people, prompted Jill Tregor, executive director of Intergroup Clearinghouse, to decry it as "an abuse of what the hate crime laws were intended to cover", stating that the white victims of these crimes were employing hate crime laws as a means to further penalize minorities.
James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter note that white people, including those who may be sympathetic to the plight of those who are victims of hate crimes by white people, bristle at the notion that hate crimes against whites are somehow inferior to, and less worthy than, hate crimes against other groups. They observe that whilst, as stated by Altschiller, no hate crime law makes any such distinction, the proposition has been argued by "a number of writers in prominent publications", who have advocated the removal of hate crimes against whites from the category of hate crime, on the grounds that hate crime laws, in their view, are intended to be affirmative action
Affirmative action
Affirmative action refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin" into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group, usually as a means to counter the effects of a history of discrimination.-Origins:The term...
for "protected groups". Jacobs and Potter opine that such a move seems to them to be "fraught with potential for social conflict and constitutional concerns".
Analysis of the 1999 FBI statistics by John Perazzo in 2001 found that white violence against black people was 28 times more likely (1 in 45 incidents) to be labelled as a hate crime than black violence against white people (1 in 1254 incidents). In analysing hate crime hoaxes, Katheryn Russell-Brown propounds a hypothesis explaining the disparity in how hate crimes against whites are viewed with respect to hate crimes against blacks. She hypothesises that the prevailing view in the minds of the public, that hate-crimes-against-blacks hoaxers intend to take advantage of, is that the crime that whites are most likely to commit against blacks is a hate crime, and that it is hard for (in her words) "most of us" to envision a white person committing a crime against a black person for a different reason. The only white people who commit crimes against black people, goes the public belief, are racially prejudiced white extremists. Whereas in contrast, she continues, the situation with hate-crimes-against-whites hoaxers differs, because the popular perception is that black people in general are liable to "run amok, committing depraved, unprovoked acts of violence" against white people.
P. J. Henry and Felicia Pratto assert that whilst certain hate crimes (that they do not specify) against white people are a valid category, that one can "speak sensibly of", and that whilst such crimes may be the result of racial prejudice, they do not constitute actual racism per se, because a hate crime against a member of a group that is superior in the power hierarchy by a member of one that is inferior cannot be racist. The concept of racism as understood by social scientists and others, they assert, requires as a fundamental element a superior-to-inferior group-based power relationship, which a hate crime against white people does not have. That said, not all social scientists agree or affirm the opinion/supposition that racism litmus tests should be based on a group-based power relationships that include thousands of individuals over hundreds of years, rather they affirm they should be taken on a more individual case by case basis. Which all social scientists agree is the most comprehensive and sensible way to determine whether racism is truly a motivating factor when the victim is white and the perpetrator is black. No one really disagrees that in the current culture and climate many black men and women feel superior to whites, and a crime committed by such an individual with said mindset against a white person could clearly have been be motivated by racism. Therefore, this individual approach has been preferred over a blanket broad brush approach of past perceived ancestral sufferings, and feelings of inferiority and/or superiority of groups that encompass thousands of individuals over hundreds of years.
See also
- Civil Rights Act of 1964Civil Rights Act of 1964The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against African Americans and women, including racial segregation...
- Civil Rights Act of 1968Civil Rights Act of 1968On April 11, 1968 U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968. Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 is commonly known as the Fair Housing Act, or as CRA '68, and was meant as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964...
- Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007
- Crime in the United StatesCrime in the United StatesCrime statistics for the United States are published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the Uniform Crime Reports which represents crimes reported to the police...
External links
- Database of hate crime statutes by state, via Anti-Defamation LeagueAnti-Defamation LeagueThe Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...
- [Hate Crimes Bill S. 1105], detailed information on hate crimes bill.
- "Hate Crime." Oxford Bibliographies Online: Criminology.