Are Hate Crime Enhancers Effective?

[jesse_the_k]

The Atlantic’s late June podcast "The Experiment" explores "Do Federal or state hate crime laws make a difference?" The reporter, Tracie Hunte, discusses hate crime enhancers with experts who are also all possible targets of hate crimes. Some — the widow of someone murdered for being South Asian — strongly support these legal tools. Others — legal scholars, a judge, and a philosopher — oppose them. The show is a coproduction with WNYC, so it’s free to access on that web site:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/experiment

It was a fascinating episode. My conclusion was that increasing penalties for hate crimes is more a gesture to make legislators feel like they’re doing something than a policy which changes behavior. I did learn that the US Department of Justice was created after the Civil War for the express purpose of ensuring formerly-enslaved people's rights — and I was dismayed to realize that was news to me. I was never taught U.S. history in school.

Audio

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/07/hate-crime-legislation-history-activist-resistance/619504/

Transcript

https://web.archive.org/web/20210730062555if_/https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/07/hate-crime-legislation-history-activist-resistance/619504/

Open "The Experiment" in your favorite podfic program
https://pod.link/1549704404

Excerpt

Hunte:

Hate-crime laws focus on the individual, and you can’t fix systemic racism by punishing individual acts of hate.

Jami Floyd:

No. One, I think hate crimes are very problematic because of the First Amendment issue. I mean, I’m really, now, just speaking as sort of an academician, intellectually: Are we prosecuting words? Are we prosecuting thoughts?

Hunte:

This question of whether hate-crime laws violate the free-speech rights of defendants has been tested in court.

Floyd:

And the big case on this is Wisconsin vs. Mitchell. By the way, here’s the interesting fact: The case involved a group of Black men—Black men and boys—who had just seen the movie Mississippi Burning, getting us back, right, to the 1960s.

Violence motivated by racial hatred is a problem we’ve been trying to solve in this country for more than 150 years.

And that’s because the U.S. didn’t begin as a multiracial democracy. It’s had to reverse-engineer one, writing laws and changing the Constitution to give more groups of people their rights. But when some disagree with this progress, they turn to violence and intimidation to stop it. And when things go wrong—a pandemic, a war, crime, terrorism, the economy—there’s always someone to blame.

Which is why it seems like hate-crime laws are more of an attempt to name a problem, but not solve it.

Comments

[davidgillon]

My counter to the 'vulnerable' argument is that it's context dependent. Anyone can be vulnerable, even special forces guys, if the context of the immediate situation puts them at risk. Most disabled people are no more 'vulnerable' than anyone else. But unfortunately the law doesn't see it that way.

WRT sentence length, I don't see tariff uplifts as an effective deterrent measure (and our sentences are in general much shorter than yours, so proportionally the uplifts are probably more significant), because the average hate crime perpetrator is too stupid to know about them, but I do see them as essential to making the courts and judiciary treat the cases seriously enough.