Hate Crimes- Are they that common?
Dr. Joseph Carrier – Multicultural Diversity

In Columbia Missouri, we pride ourselves on making national news for our sports programs, academics and becoming one of the top places to live in the country. We live by a code of inclusion and acceptance and have become a liberal Mecca. However, recent events in the growing city have shown another, less attractive side to the home of the University of Missouri. With making national headlines and social media uproars, Mizzou has become a symbol for the fight against hate crimes. However, these crimes aren’t just happening in small towns and conservative states; hate crimes are everywhere. With the introduction to the internet and social media taking off like wildfire, the past twenty years that should have created progress, have created convenience. It’s now easier than ever to target and seek out individuals and to receive recognition for these crimes. Many people have heard the term, but few know its actual definition. A hate crime is defined as a criminal offense committed against persons, property, or society which is motivated, in whole or in part, by offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol website. In 2007, a hate crime occurred once very hour of everyday, totaling an estimated 7,600 crimes. That is a staggering number when you think about all of those crimes being motivated by prejudice to a specific kind of person. Today, four of the major groups being targeting are the LGBT community, African Americans, Muslims and people with disabilities. When broken down into their own issues, it becomes clear why these groups are some of the most heavily targeted. My research should help clarify why and how crimes against these certain groups have become so prevalent.
When hate crimes first originated, they weren’t called hate crimes. There were no definitions; there were no laws, and certainly no punishments. The onset of hate crimes in the modern society started with African Americans. Though many think of the onset of hate crimes being closer to the time period of segregation and civil rights movements, hate crimes started many years before that. The first introduction of hate crimes towards the African American race began with slavery, but entered the modern era with topics like segregation and public hangings. Though the end of slavery tends to be where most people reason that rights started to become more equal, true progress wasn’t made until much later than that. The Jim Crow laws(pilgrim, 2012) that began the separation of whites and blacks in society, tends to be where the dark tales of hate crimes start. Being forced to go to different schools, eat at different restaurants and drink from different fountains, encouragement to separate the two races came from everywhere. When the civil rights movement began in 1955 (Civil Rights Movement, 2015), the goal was to finally end the separation of two races and have them be seen as equal. However, with hatred already being a learned behavior from one race to another, it has continued to create tension between white people and black people. It’s hard when being raised that one race is of lesser human value than another, to unlearn those behaviors and then to refrain from teaching them to the next generation. As the oldest documented group to be so heavily discriminated against, there comes a sense of “we didn’t know any better” from the white community. The hate towards this race tends to be blamed on tradition and old teachings instead of admitting that classifying another human being as less than a person is where things went wrong in the first place. When society said that it was okay to let two different races live their lives like the other didn’t exist, it created a barrier that is still present today. It condones stereotypes that all white people believe black people are lesser than them, and white people believe that black people always assume this. Current events surrounding racism have only confirmed that this is happening. When the Concerned Student 1950 campaign started on Mizzou’s campus in early October, it was their list of demands that made a national uproar. Including things such as the University of Missouri System President, Tim Wolfes, acknowledgment of his white male privilege, and a demand for the percent of black teachers to rise to %10 before the 2017-2018 academic year (List of Demands From Concerned Student 1950 Group, 2015), the tension isn’t being created from one specific direction. As black people say they are striving for equality, their actions are saying otherwise. Specifying a demand to tailor to a certain race doesn’t seem to be something any other race could be granted. Instead of working towards inclusion with the students and employees already at Mizzou, they are asking for the privilege they say is unfair for white people to receive. The true mark of inclusion and equality is to show with actions that change can be made silently and without protest. The answer to making everyone equal shouldn’t be to outshine another race, which in this section of discrimination seems to the fuel for both sides of the fire. Many hate crimes against the black community are triggered by the need that black people feel to be seen as equal. Individuals that already discriminate against black people as a whole use the actions of these individuals, social media and otherwise, to base the hatred they have for them. An example of this kind of “hate crime encouragement” is the negative actions during Ferguson. Between looting stores, neighborhood shootings and human barricades stopping traffic on four lane highways, it’s hard for people to understand that these actions come from a place of wanted to be considered equal. While most groups that have high statistics for hate crimes want to prove the stereotypes wrong and stay away from the bad connotation, the black community as a whole seems to think that violence and extreme behavior is the way to get people to pay attention. In order to decrease the crime against black people simply because they are black, we have to stop treating them like they are different. Black people can’t believe that equal rights means special privileges and white people can’t inclusion optional.
On September 11th of 2001, two things changed in the United States of America. It suffered the single largest loss of life from a foreign attack on U.S soil, and the views Americans had of the Middle East would forever be changed. Flight 77 was the first major act of terrorism from the Middle East and the stereotype that came with it has been detrimental to the hate crimes against Middle Eastern ethnicities. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports program, “hate crimes against Middle Easterners have become five times more common (Ingraham, 2015) Before 9-11 occurred, there was an average of 20-30 crimes racially motivated against Middle Eastern ethnicities per year, and in 2001, that number jumped to 500”. Every year since then, the numbers have stayed between 100-150 hate crimes per year, five times higher than pre 9-11 occurrences. Though many associate hate crimes being something that doesn’t happen in their community, Columbia has to been home to several hate crimes including one against a Middle Eastern family in September of 2015. On the first night of Ramadan, a man and his children were on their way to pray at the Islamic Center on 5th street, when a man circled around the block several times yelling inappropriate slurs before finally stopping and punching the father( Boyce, 2015). He was later arrested on suspicion of a hate crime. Unfortunately, a lot of the reason for hate crimes against the Middle Eastern ethnicity comes from slanted information provided from the media that causes people to believe we aren’t safe in our local environments. It is true that we have terrorists that are Muslim, as it is also true that we have Muslims who aren’t terrorists. But most importantly, we have Middles Easterners that aren’t Muslim. Making this assumption and classifying them as all being individuals that believe in extreme way to get their message across is where the hate stems from. We wouldn’t say that every white person in America is a Christian and further than that, we wouldn’t say that just because we have Christian organizations in America with very odd principles that people should fear your run of the mill Christian. Middle Eastern cultures are the most misunderstood minority that becomes victim to hate crimes because people make some many assumptions about them instead of basing anything on fact.
A large number of hate crime statistics are taken up from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community (LGBT). With recent successes such as the ability for transgender people to receive health care and the first transgender woman makes the cover of TIME magazine, the LGBT community seems to be thriving. However, research from the last few years says though they are integrating into society, not everyone is happy about it. An article published by the Huffington Post said that as of April 2015(Shapiro, 2015), there have been 14 deaths reported as hate crimes against LGBT individuals. Sharon Stapel, the director of the Anti-Violence Project, believes that as the community becomes more integrated, with things like same sex marriage becoming legalized nationwide, its contributing to the violence. Of the 14 deaths already reported this year, 2/3 of the crimes were reported as transgender violence. Several instances such as the death of Angie Zapata, happen every year. In Greeley, Colorado on July 16, 2008, Angie Zapata, 20, was beaten to death by her date after he discovered she was transgender. Zapata's killer, Allen Andrade, told police that after he discovered Zapata had male genitalia, he hit her twice in the head with a fire extinguisher thinking he had, in his words, "killed it." Andrade was reportedly a member of a Colorado gang that is known for having a zero-tolerance policy on homosexuality. He was charged with first degree murder and a hate crime. Andrade was found guilty of these crimes on April 22, 2009 (The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 2015). Stapel later goes on to say “We’re living a double-edged sword. When there’s increasing visibility, there’s also increasing hate towards our community.” In a statement published by The Anti-Violence Project, they call on media and police departments to accurately identify victims, and on public officials to pass laws addressing the ongoing day-to-day discrimination many LGBT people continue to face, which leads to increased rates of poverty, housing instability and unemployment. Unfortunately, hate crimes committed against LGBT individuals can be the hardest to properly document. In the research done by NCAVP, considered to be the most accurate on LGBT hate crime statistics, only half of all LGBT crimes are reported to the police, and 27 percent of the people who did report their crimes say they experienced a hostile attitude from the police. When crimes are reported, the issue of proper reporting also arises. In many cases, police will omit that the victim was transgender if their identification says they are male. The same report from NCAVP(Ennis, 2015) went on to say that only 6 percent of the crimes they classified as being bias towards LGBT’s, we also classified that way by police. Chai Jindasurat of NCVAP says “When law enforcement does not take the violence seriously, it sends a message to survivors that what happens to them is not a problem.” Many public figures and state officials have spoken out saying that the more prevalent it becomes in our culture, the worse the crime are getting. “My belief from having done this work for many years is that surges in types of hate incidents are linked to the headlines and controversies of the day”, says a Santa Clara County prosecutor. As movements such as Prop8 and the passing of Obergefell v. Hodges create media uproar, the crimes against this group seem to spike. For example in 2009, with the hype of Prop8 there was a surge in anti-gay hate crime, and is 2013, when France passed a bill for marriage equality, hate crimes increased by 30 percent. With the year not being over yet, it’s hard to know what the passing of marriage equality will do the numbers reported in the U.S., but Mark Potok with the Southern Poverty Law Center says “We don’t know if it’s [going to] have a direct effect yet, but I think it’s extremely likely that we will see anti-gay hate crime go up if and when same-sex marriage is legalized throughout the country.” However, what’s happening in the media isn’t always the biggest threat to the safety of this community. Though crimes against gay, lesbian and transgender people has existed well before it was a major topic, the last twenty years has added something that has made these individuals an easier target. The internet and social media has created a way for people to seek out victims and carry out crimes that could have been prevented. Unlike any other group subjected to hate crimes, this group has a staggering amount of social media and dating platforms that share their personal information unlike any other group. With apps like Grindr and dating websites that are strictly for gay and lesbian users, it lets people wishing to carry out crimes against them, find them in a matter of seconds. Both of these apps encourage the communication and meeting of potential companions in your area. However, it’s not always the person you believe you’ve been talking to and this becomes a breeding ground for people looking to target gay and lesbian individuals. For example, it takes less than five minutes to create a profile on the ever popular Grindr. Most sites, including this one have a way to verify that you are the person you’re using pictures of, but if you are a predator and not actually looking for a date, most would have no problem using their own pictures. You then contact someone you’d like to talk to, schedule a time to meet and things are supposed to take off from there. However, using these apps to bait in potential victims of hate crimes is a very serious reality. The murder of Ahmed Said and Dwone Anderson-Young in Seattle Washington show just how real these possibilities are. After communicating with Ali Muhammad Brown on the app Grindr, Said and Anderson-Young got into Browns car outside a popular gay bar and were found 17 minutes later, shot in the head. After looking into it, police have said all signs point to a hate crime (Tharett, 2014) . With crimes like this happening, we can’t blame it on anything but the internet and the development in the last twenty years of meeting partners on internet sites before meeting them in real life. The rise in hate crimes against this specific group has also seen a rise as the community has had more traffic on the internet. They are able to post pictures of their lives, in which perpetuators of hate crimes are disgusted by, on their social media sites and this can make it easier for them to be a victim of hate crime. Last, the group that many people might not think about as being a victim of hate crimes is the disabled population. Too often the crimes against these individuals are seen as abuse or neglect, instead of realizing that there is a deeper hate behind some of the crimes against the disabled. The first reason that these individuals are so prevalent to hate crimes is because people know they will have a harder time being trusted to provide accurate information of the crime. People with disabilities affecting their motor skills and speech are going to have a much more difficult time relaying the specifics of a crime against them than someone of sound mind trying to give details of their attack or attacker. With disabilities making it harder to give an accurate story, more often than not these crimes are left to be handled by social worker and teachers and usually not reported to the police. When they are reported to the police, the same issues that we see with the LGBT community arise. Instead of considering that someone attacked them because of who they are, they strip away the association of them being a person capable of making decisions and forming thoughts and call it abuse. In the last twenty years, this group has had a resource to become more visible and easier to target; the internet. With the oncoming of chat rooms and forum websites that then developed into social media sites such as Myspace and Facebook, they had a chance to appear “normal”. The use of social media makes it easier to target people with mental disabilities because they don’t always understand what is happening to them. For example, someone with a mental disability can correspond with someone online for quite some time, possibly forever, without picking up on underlying tones of messages, certain phrases or simply being able to tell that someone is uninterested in talking to them. When given attention they tend to believe that everyone is their “friend”. When family and friends, who usually let time online be an outlet for their loved one, fail to interject, these disabled people can get into some very bad situations. CNN published an article on September, 24, 2014 about a disabled man who was beaten by three teenage boys while it was recorded. The next step of their hate crime shines light on how this group, as well as the other three minorities discussed in this paper, have had the internet used against them. The three teenagers from Delaware, not only recorded the video of them beating this man while he lay begging them to stop, but then uploaded it to the internet for everyone to watch. The stepmother of victim later commented that she couldn’t believe they would do this to him, as he thought the boys were his friends.( Videos Of Mentally…2014) It’s a hard line to draw as a parent or caretaker of someone disabled to try and explain that not everyone is their friend. Though the boys didn’t take to social media to try and be his friend, they did use it to promote their bullying and performance of the crime. If efforts to end hate crimes against the disabled are ever going to make a difference, it’s going to require that extra precautions are taken for people who may not fully understand what’s happening to them. Nothing would be scarier than knowing you were a victim of a crime because of who you are as a person and not being able to voice that appropriately to get the help needed. Systems need to be put in place to protect people that don’t have a voice to defend themselves. We are seeing something very similar to this happening in the news with former Oklahoma police officer, Daniel Holtzclaw. The former Oklahoma City Police Officer was just found guilty of several charges of rape where he targeted low income women and prostitutes because he sees them as easier targets (Martinez, 2015). The same is done with disabled individuals when people see them as easy targets because of their circumstance. However, you wouldn’t say that these women were abused because they were afraid to come forward when no one would believe them over a person of authority. We shouldn’t be doing this to disabled people either.
In conclusion, the past twenty years have put an emphasis on hate crimes because of the internet boom. No other time period has had such readily available access to other human beings and the ability to have instant gratification for their irrational and slanted views. The internet has been able to give people instant access to others like them which has only made the situation worse. Before the internet, people didn’t have a way to search for others with similar opinions and even more, people who have thought about or people who have carried out a hate crime. It lets the people participating in such things feel like they aren’t weird or wrong for being who they are because there are others just like them. The internet has also given people an instant voice, for opinions and debates. Whereas before the internet, the only news coverage we got or updates on trending topics, was from mainstream media coverage. Now, with the uprising of the internet, you can get facts and stories from hundreds of different sources. Some of them however, are not very credible sites and display false information. This can make people who already hate a certain group of people, despise them. Some false stories are posted just to get a rise out of people and when it comes to hate crimes, much of the information that fuels them are just that. False stories made up to give readers a skewed view of a person or group of people. It also gives individuals the ability to voice their opinion and have people immediately respond. We saw this for instance, with the recent movement against racism at the University of Missouri. People were Tweeting and Facebooking updates that were not true, and opinions with no educational premise. When people are given a voice that want to do nothing besides cause trouble, it seems to bring out some very negative backlash. When people from Mizzou were posting throughout the attacks on Paris saying the focus needed to remain on Mizzou and the issues on campus, it created an outrage from people already against the movement and the race that stood behind it. By the end of the news coverage over the topic, two students had been arrested for racial comments and threatening to kill black students. Social media via the internet let them put that out there for everyone to see. Social media alone gave the person behind the keyboard the ability to cancel classes the next day out of fear. What someone was able to say, in a racially hateful comment, shut down an entire college campus. This says that we as a society are giving people way to much credit and freedom to say what they want and do what they want on the World Wide Web without consequence, and until there is proper punishment, we will only see a rise in hate crimes. It creates the perfect scenario for someone looking to seek out, target and victimize an individual based on their characteristics. People need to safeguard their personal information from strangers on the internet and know that sometimes letting people know your opinions about certain kinds of people or major debatable topics can leave you open for predators angered by certain people, or events. Everyone sees social media as a place to air their dirty laundry or most personal information and in today’s world, that is way too dangerous. Provided with the facts from this research, the goal is for people to retrain people’s minds to understand one thing; we cannot stop hate crimes, we can however, keep ourselves safer.

References
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