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[Crossposted from OKC]
Source of this quote unknown (if you know, please tell me so I can properly attribute it)
I've seen this quote in a few places asking about why hate crimes are treated differently than other crimes. For the most part this is asked as a rhetorical question and the poster is assuming there is no good policy basis for a hate crime law. I'd like to treat the question seriously and offer some insight into how Hate Crimes laws work when they are implemented well.
Before looking at the laws themselves, it is better to look at the community into which they are being applied. Gay people get bashed, often fatally, just because they are gay. Similar crimes plague minorities, and domestic violence has disproportionate effect on women. There are lots of statistics about exactly how disproportionate the impact is on the various communities, and I've seen many an argument get lost arguing those stats, so I want to put them explicitly off limits because frequency has little to do with this.
What does have a lot to do with this is discretion within the executive branches, especially of local governments. If the local police officers or prosecutors are bigots, crimes against the targeted group sometimes get ignored. Even if the criminal is not a bigot, the knowledge that they are more likely to get away with a crime if they target a transgendered person (for example) makes them more likely to pick one.
One of the most important effects of a Hate Crimes law is that it allows officers like the Federal Bureau of Investigation to step in to investigate and prosecute an individual a local bigot would have allowed to get away. So this looks like a special protection, but it is really a way to deliver the regular protection when the regular mechanism would fail.
Consider a lynching in a deeply racist town, where "some of those who burn crosses are the same who work forces" (i.e. the police are criminal participants and unlikely to arrest themselves). Without an external law enforcement agency authorized to investigate, there is no effective law nor justice for the victims.
Source of this quote unknown (if you know, please tell me so I can properly attribute it)
When you pass laws which assign greater guilt to certain parties for committing the same crimes, based on nothing more than what they were thinking at the time and the “class” of citizens who were the victims, then you are providing unequal protection of the laws. You are assigning a higher value to the lives, liberty and property of some victims than others based on their sexual orientation, their race, skin color, religion, etc'...Creating classes of victims means creating classes of citizenry. Either we’re all the same, or we’re just competing for the most politically-correct biases. That’s more likely to perpetuate resentment than it is to reduce hatred.
I've seen this quote in a few places asking about why hate crimes are treated differently than other crimes. For the most part this is asked as a rhetorical question and the poster is assuming there is no good policy basis for a hate crime law. I'd like to treat the question seriously and offer some insight into how Hate Crimes laws work when they are implemented well.
Before looking at the laws themselves, it is better to look at the community into which they are being applied. Gay people get bashed, often fatally, just because they are gay. Similar crimes plague minorities, and domestic violence has disproportionate effect on women. There are lots of statistics about exactly how disproportionate the impact is on the various communities, and I've seen many an argument get lost arguing those stats, so I want to put them explicitly off limits because frequency has little to do with this.
What does have a lot to do with this is discretion within the executive branches, especially of local governments. If the local police officers or prosecutors are bigots, crimes against the targeted group sometimes get ignored. Even if the criminal is not a bigot, the knowledge that they are more likely to get away with a crime if they target a transgendered person (for example) makes them more likely to pick one.
One of the most important effects of a Hate Crimes law is that it allows officers like the Federal Bureau of Investigation to step in to investigate and prosecute an individual a local bigot would have allowed to get away. So this looks like a special protection, but it is really a way to deliver the regular protection when the regular mechanism would fail.
Consider a lynching in a deeply racist town, where "some of those who burn crosses are the same who work forces" (i.e. the police are criminal participants and unlikely to arrest themselves). Without an external law enforcement agency authorized to investigate, there is no effective law nor justice for the victims.
