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ANALYSIS OF HATE CRIME
Would you believe that a black in the US is about 20 times more likely to be a victim of hate crime than a white? This is
not the claim of a left-wing crazy. It comes from data in the 1998 hate-crime report of the FBI. Data from the two previous
reports yield about the same odds. We will try to put the facts in perspective.
In 1990, Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act, requiring the Justice Department to collect and publish annual
statistics on crimes that "manifest prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity." To comply, the FBI
collects data submitted voluntarily by local law-enforcement agencies, and assembles them into an annual summary report.
Most of the analysis you will find here pertains to the numbers found in these reports. Anyone who has pored over Government
documents, knows first-hand how agencies can manipulate data to make a point. Crime statistics are a good
example, the treatment of hate-crime data being especially egregious. The Justice
department has wide latitude in how they comply with the Hate Crime Statistics Act. Accordingly, it has bent the
data toward its own ends by omitting categories for ethnic offenders. Thus, Hispanics cannot be hate criminals, only hate
victims. When a Hispanic commits a hate crime, he is counted as white. When he is a victim, he
becomes Hispanic.
In this way the FBI pads the number of white offenders. Despite this baggage we can learn much from the FBI data.
By focusing on victims, we can sidestep Justice Department attempts at
obfuscation.
Minorities
suffer simply because they are minorities. A blueprint for hate-crime
data If there are 1,000 hate criminals in an offender group, there will be 1,000 or more victims in the victim group. Regardless of the victim group's size, 1 million, 10 million or 50 million, the 1,000 hate criminals in the offender group will commit the same number of offenses. For a given hate-crime proclivity, the size of the offender group determines the number of its offenses. All things equal, a majority group produces more offenders than a minority group. Differential group tendencies not withstanding, a majority group simply has more members. The size of the victim group is also important. It determines how well the
group absorbs the crime directed toward it. If a thousand
crimes are perpetrated against a group of one million and a like number against a group of ten million, each member of the
smaller group suffers a tenfold greater risk. Consequently, with respect to hate crime, minorities
are at a double
disadvantage having nothing to do with differential bias. A large dominant group produces many offenders, whose crimes
must be borne by relatively few in a minority victim group. In other words, minorities suffer simply because they are minorities.
This is a mathematical reality having nothing to do with differential group bias. One should always view hate-crime
evidence against this backdrop. Inverse square risk
Suppose our black and white universe contains NW whites and NB blacks. Let pW and pB be the probabilities, respectively, of a white or black being victimized in a given year. Assuming the average number of victims per offender is constant across the two groups, we can write,
The quantities, kB and kW , are constants closely related to the respective probabilities that a black or a white is a hate-criminal. If there were one victim per offender, the constants would be precisely these probabilities. We call kB and kW the black and white hate proclivities, respectively. They are intrinsic group properties. From (1) we can write the (per capita) risk ratio, pB /pW :
And we have the interesting result that the per capita risk ratio varies inversely with the hate-proclivity ratio and also inversely with the square of the group size ratio. Quadratic dependence on group size makes it the major determinant of the black to white risk ratio. As the disparity in group size grows, minority group members rapidly become more vulnerable. At the same time, members of the dominant group become safer. In the special case where both groups have equal proclivities for committing hate crime, kW = kB, and
That is, assuming equal hate proclivity, the per capita risk ratio is the inverse square of the group population ratio.
Equal hate proclivity hypothesis If you were one of the 195.4 million non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. in 1998, there were 32.7 million non-Hispanic blacks
potentially ready to abuse you in some way and vice versa. For the moment assume that racial and ethnic groups share
equal tendencies to abuse members of other groups. That is, if one in every thousand whites has this proclivity, then also
one in every thousand blacks or Native Americans or Asians has it as well. We call this the equal hate-proclivity
hypothesis. Under it, we seek the relative hate-crime risk to groups of various
sizes. According to (3), under the equal hate
proclivity hypothesis, a black should have been (195.4/32.7)2 or 35.7 times more
likely than a white to be a victim of hate crime in 1998. Put in this light, we see that in reality the relative risk of blacks (21.8 times
that of whites) was less than expected assuming no differential group bias. In fact, the black risk was only 61 percent of that
expected from group size considerations alone. We need to ask, therefore, not why the per capita risk ratio of blacks to
whites is so high, but rather why is it so low? The answer is simple: The equal hate proclivity hypothesis is false.
If we also know the number of black and white victims, NVB and NVW , respectively, we can evaluate the individual hate proclivities. From (1), the probability of a black being victimized by a white is kWNW /NB . This quantity is also the rate of black victimization, or NVB /NB . Consequently,
The FBI reports the number of hate-offenders by race, though the white offender entry is inflated by the inclusion of
Hispanics. For 1998, the report lists 1303 suspected black offenders and 2084 suspected white offenders. This yields a
per capita offender ratio (B/W) of 1.7, in reasonable agreement with the hate-proclivity ratio of 1.6. Table 1 summarizes
these calculations for the three most recent FBI reports.
Political types of various stripes chimed in. Ralph Reed, then Director of the Christian Coalition, termed the arsons, "the greatest outbreak of violence against the black church since the height of the civil rights movement." Deval Patrick, assistant attorney general for civil rights, proclaimed the fires to be "an epidemic of terror." President Clinton, in one of his weekly radio addresses, recalled in a now famous evocation, "vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child." (It was later discovered that no black church had been burned in Arkansas during his childhood.) Clinton called a conference of Southern governors to deal with the burnings. He toured burned-out churches, once on his 50th birthday. The press tagged along. Congress, not to be upstaged, passed the Church Fire Prevention Act of 1996, making church burning a federal crime. Not everyone bought in. Michael Fumento, writing in the Wall Street Journal, analyzed the data and found that much of it was spurious. He showed that there had been no increase in church arson in the South from 1990 to 1995. Fumento noted that in 1995, USA Today reported 45 arsons against white churches, compared to 27 against black churches. He also observed that the 1996 figures were inflated by copycat crimes. Eventually, numbers began to roll in indicating that more white than black churches had been torched. It did not make much difference to some in the press. Paula Walker, vice president and news director of WNBC-TV, reacted to the reports while attending a National Association of Black Journalists convention in August 1996. She concluded that, "There didn't seem to be much substantiation other than raw numbers."
We can put the Church-burning data under the microscope. Our foregoing analysis, with some modification, is well suited to the task. Faced with the fact that bias-motivated crime is only a small fraction of total crime, hate-crime activists fall back on the position that these offenses are underreported. But the charred ruins of a burned-out church cannot go unreported. We include all the burnings in our analysis, including copycat arsons. We also make the worst-case assumptions, ascribing bias-motivation to an arson whenever there is doubt. We want to calculate, from available data, the hate-proclivity ratio, kB / kW , as it applies to church burning. For this case it is the ratio of proclivities of blacks and whites, respectively, to torch each other's churches. People are the perpetrators, but victims now are churches. We use asterisks to denote torched churches and write from (4),
The states where most of the burnings occurred were Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina and Florida. Blacks make up about 20 percent of the population in these states. Putting all the numbers into (5), yields kB / kW = 5.3. That is, while whites were being blamed for burning black churches, and were drowning in their own guilt, the facts reveal a black was 5 times more likely than a white to commit bias-motivated church arson.
Each year, when the FBI releases its hate crime report, the press and other media take notice. Race bias is the favorite theme, though anti-homosexual acts are making a run for first place. Here are some typical headlines.
Both FBI press releases and the media omit the singularly compelling fact that hate crime is a minute fraction of total crime. Selective exaggeration is not restricted to hate crime. An analogous pattern emerges in the reporting of AIDS. AIDS accounts for under 1 percent of deaths in the US, less than from the respiratory diseases, bronchitis, emphysema and asthma. When did you last see a bronchitis headline? In its last complete National Criminal Victimization Survey (1994), the Justice Department revealed blacks to have committed 1,600,951 violent crimes against whites. Only 15 percent of these had robbery as a motive. We can safely infer that most of the rest had race as at least a partial motive. Eighty-five percent of the attacks were assaults and rapes. While blacks were committing these 1.6 million crimes against whites, whites were reciprocating with 165,345 violent offenses against blacks. Blacks, representing thirteen percent of the nation, committed more than 90 percent of the violent interracial crime. Fifty-seven percent of the violent crime committed by blacks had white victims. Less than 3 percent of violence committed by whites had black victims. In 1994, a black was 64 times more likely to attack a white than vice versa. This is the real story of hate in America. It is the media's well-kept secret.
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