[lbo-talk] Quick question on U.S. hate crime stats by state

Wendy Lyon wendy.lyon at gmail.com
Sat Apr 24 23:20:26 PDT 2010


On 24/04/2010, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:


> I would go so far as to say that the policy towards hate crimes in London probably exaggerates their incidence. The London metropolitan police regularly record crimes where perpetrators are black and victims white as 'hate crimes', as they do conflicts between Bangladeshis and black Britons.

It's not just the London police whose reporting methods are problematic. Around a decade ago the National Front were putting it about that a Commission for Racial Equality report showed more racial attacks against whites than blacks in a particular year. This set off my bullshit detector so I had a look at the report. It turned out it didn't refer to racial *attacks* but it did say that there were more racial *incidents* against whites than blacks. However, it reached this conclusion by defining incidents to include vandalism, defining racial to include anti-semitic, and defining whites to include Jews - so that when a swastika was spray-painted on a synagogue, voila, a racial incident against whites. (I have no idea whether any attempt was made to determine whether it might have been a synagogue for Ethiopian Jews or whatever.) And apparently there were a spate of such attacks that year thus pushing up the "anti-white" rate. If you read the report in full it was clearly not painting a picture of rampant black-on-white racial crime - another statistic in it showed that whites were far more likely to be the perpetrators - but of course, very few people read the report in full and an unfortunate number read the NF interpretation.

That said, I'd be willing to bet that even if the Met are overstating the number of hate crimes by wrongly including many that aren't racially motivated, there's probably a significant balancing effect due to many victims of crimes that *are* racially motivated not bothering to report them as such (or report them at all) - particularly victims from the most marginalised immigrant/ethnic communities where the crimes are low-level and the perpetrators are "indigenous" white English.



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