A Meaningless “Hate Crimes” Report

The Department of Justice has just released its “hate crimes” report for 2012. As usual, it is a mix of the inexcusable, the unreliable, and the incomprehensible. To begin with the inexcusable, it still lists Hispanics as a victim category but not as a perpetrator category. Offenders can only be white, black, Indian/Eskimo, or Asian, so despite the fact that Hispanics are the second largest group in the country, as offenders they are lumped in with whites.

The report lists 42 different categories for where hate crimes took place — 105 at bars or nightclubs, 72 in convenience stores, for example — but it would have us believe that not one of 53 million Hispanics committed a “hate crime.”

It is bad enough that the Justice Department treats Hispanics as whites for its reports on index crimes, thereby inflating the “white” crime rate. To fail to account for Hispanic perpetrators in what is supposed to be a report on discrimination is beyond inexcusable.

Hispanics are only the largest perpetrator category that is omitted. Homosexuals, the handicapped, Jews, Muslims, etc. are carefully classified as victims, but never as perpetrators.

As we will see, local reporting to the DOJ on “hate crimes” is so wildly inconsistent that it is not possible to take any of this information seriously, but what does this report claim to tell us?

In all of 2012 there were 6,705 bias “offenses” which had the following motivations:

Race: 3,297

Sexual orientation: 1,318

Religion: 1,166

Ethnic/national origin: 822

Disability: 102

Types of offense range from serious violence — there were 10 murders — to such things as 1,906 cases of property destruction/vandalism. Some of the finer bias motivations — and the number of incidents — were as follows:

Anti-black: 2,180

Anti-homosexual: 1,089

Anti-Jewish: 696

Anti-white: 739

Anti-Hispanic: 488

Anti-lesbian: 162

Anti-Islamic: 149

Anti-Asian: 134

Anti-American Indian/Eskimo: 109

Anti-Catholic: 79

Anti-Protestant: 34

Who are the offenders? No fewer than 30 percent are unknown, and most of those cases were anonymous graffiti and property damage. Of the known offenders, 60 percent are said to be “white,” which includes Hispanics, and 21 percent were black. There is reason to question whether the police look as hard for “hate” when whites are victims as they do when whites are perpetrators, but blacks are still considerably overrepresented as hate criminals. They are 13 percent of the population, and when the Census Bureau calls Hispanics white, it counts the white population as 78 percent. On a per capita basis, therefore, blacks were 2.1 times more likely than “whites” to be counted as hate-crime perpetrators. The Justice Department does not point this out.

The report includes 209 anti-white offenses committed by “whites.” It is hard to understand these crimes as anything but anti-white offenses committed by Hispanics who were classified as white.

The report says that in all of 2012, there were 3,968 crimes against persons that were, as the report puts it, “motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias.” Of this number, 1,570 were simple assaults and 1,489 were acts of “intimidation.” The FBI does not even count these crimes in its Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) because they are so unimportant, so if we subtract them that leaves 909 cases of murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault said to be motivated by all the varieties of hate. In 2011 the UCR counted 1,206,000 violent crimes in the United States, so those 909 hate crimes represent 0.075 percent of the total, or one in about every 1,350 violent crimes.

As for inter-racial crime, the best source of general information is the large-scale FBI survey called Criminal Victimization in the United States. In 2008, the most recent year racial data were collected, the American public reported 571,117 cases of violent crime and attempted violence by blacks against “whites” (as usual, the FBI lumps Hispanics in with “whites”) and only 90,717 such crimes by “whites” against blacks. (This means that any given black was 38 times more likely to attack a “white” than the other way around — a good subject for a different article.) These acts of inter-racial violence included single– and multiple– offender crimes, and not all of them were reported to the police, but they add up to 661,888 attempted and successful crimes of interracial violence.

How does that number compare to the interracial offenses in this report? The total of  2,695 official acts of “hate” violence committed for reasons of race (2,197) and ethnicity (588) — and this includes simple assault and “intimidation” — are just 0.4 percent of the total interracial violence figure of 661,888. If we are to believe this report, only one out of every 250 acts of interracial violence is motivated even “in part” by racial animus.

But what about the 10 murders and 15 rapes that the FBI says were committed for reasons of bias? Six of the murders were motivated by “anti-other religion,” and are undoubtedly the six people Wade Michael Page killed when he shot up a Sikh temple. Two were described as anti-Islamic, one was anti-homosexual, and one was anti-white. Eight of the murders were by “whites,” one was by a black, and in one case the killer was not identified.

One of the rapes was anti-white, three were anti-American Indian, and one was anti-Hispanic.

Four of the rapes were anti-homosexual, four were anti-lesbian, and one was anti-bisexual. It’s not obvious what would be an anti-homosexual or anti-bisexual rape; the report does not explain. Of the 15 rapes, six were reportedly by “whites,” two by blacks, one was by an otherwise unidentified mixed-race group, and six could not be identified by race.

One wonders how a victim could fail to identify a rapist’s race, but there are other strange things in this report: 142 burglaries, 258 larceny/thefts, and 23 motor-vehicle thefts that were apparently motivated by “in whole or in part” by bias.

There are also 203 offenses bafflingly categorized as “crimes against society.” According to the fine print, this is a catchall category for “hate crime data about drug or narcotic offenses, gambling offenses, prostitution offenses, and weapon law violations.” The report does not explain how selling drugs or carrying an unlicensed pistol can be a hate crime.

The fact is, there is really no point in trying to puzzle over what this report means because the data are meaningless. The Department of Justice itself concedes that not all police departments report data. Hawaii has simply opted out of the program, and New Jersey didn’t bother to send any information for 2012.

At the same time, many states send in unbelievable data. Alabama’s 4.7 million people produced only 6 hate crimes, whereas Kentucky’s 4.3 million were guilty of 194. Texas, with 25 million people, reported only 52 hate crimes, while Tennessee, with only 6.3 million racked up 316. Thus hate crimes run from a low of 0.13 per 100,000 population in Alabama to a high of 11.97 per 100,000 in the District of Columbia — a preposterous 92-fold difference.

DOJ concedes that it does not get reports from all police departments, and that what it gets covers only 79.3 percent of the American population. However, even the places that do count hate crimes do it in wildly inconsistent ways. No fewer than 13,022 departments sent in information, so there was plenty of room for inconsistency, and of those departments, no fewer than 11,290 reported no bias crimes at all.

One might conclude that the hate-free departments are in out-of-the way, homogeneous places where everyone gets along, but no. Atlanta, for example, reported no hate. In fact, all 2.4 million people who lived Cobb, DeKalb, and Fulton Counties were free of hate. The 2.5 million Floridians who live in Miami-Date County and the 1.8 million in Broward County were equally hate free. The 1.3 million people of Hillsborough County, which contains Tampa, were just as fortunate, as were the 900,000 North Carolinians who live in the county that contains Raleigh and the 780,000 people of San Mateo County, California.

New Orleans had only two hate crimes, and Philadelphia’s population of 1.5 million produced only 11.

Seattle, Washington (population 627,000; 85 hate crimes) and Lexington, Kentucky (population 302,000; 41 hate crimes) are, according to this report, some of the nastiest places in America, with per capita hate-crime rates that are 19 times that of Philadelphia, 26 times that of Chicago, and 85 times that of Baltimore. It is easy to imagine majority-white police departments earnestly tracking down hate; the police in Baltimore and Philadelphia have their hands full fighting crime.

Even within the same state, there are strange disparities. The populations of Memphis and Nashville are about the same, but Memphis had 61 hate crimes to Nashville’s 10. Dallas, Boston, and Louisville are a few of the cities that didn’t bother to send in reports at all.

Obviously, this report is meaningless. Every year DOJ puts it out because Congress requires it by law. Every so often Congress adds new categories of victims for the police to track: handicapped people, homosexuals, Muslims. Police officers can’t stand this kind of paperwork, and plenty of them probably just don’t do it. The DOJ bureaucrats who actually have to compile the crazy stuff they get from the field are bound to know that the report they are writing is a farce, but they get paid anyway.

Hate Crime Statistics, 2012 is a perfect example of the confusion and futility that ensue when a multi-racial country refuses to accept the most obvious facts about race.

Note: A helpful guide to the US Census Bureau website can be found here.