6/22/00 9:00 a.m.
Hate (Crime) Cannot Wish Thee Worse
More evidence that the country has gone mad.

By John Derbyshire, NR Contributing Editor

nyone seeking evidence that the country has gone mad need look no further than the current passion for "hate crime" legislation. On June 20th the U.S. Senate passed the Kennedy-Smith bill making "hate crimes" against homosexuals a federal crime; on the 21st, the New York State Senate will almost certainly pass a "hate crime" bill, joining 41 other states that already have such legislation in place. Of the New York bill, Matthew Forman said: "It's really a great victory over hate and prejudice." Forman is executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, a gay-rights organization. Legislation against greed, envy, pride, sloth, and gluttony will no doubt soon follow.

It remains to be explained, to me at any rate, why whacking someone over the head with a tire iron while yelling, "Take that, faggot!" is more heinous than performing the same act while murmuring, "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.” Indeed, it is hard to see why the first instance, equally with the second, is not merely the conjunction of a class A felony with an exercise of First Amendment rights. The lawyers are going to have fun with this. Perhaps that's the main point; legislators, after all, are mainly lawyers, and legislation of this sort is really just drumming up business. You don't even need to ask which side of this the Trial Lawyers' Association is on.

There is a widespread perception among ordinary Americans that "hate crime" legislation is another sop to the race lobbies, and that "hate" is a new synonym for “racism.” In fact, to judge from the voiced support for the above two pieces of legislation (in the New York Times report, the leading voice quoted in applause of the federal one was Barney Frank), leaders of the anti-racism industry seem to have cooled on "hate crime" legislation. The most vocal advocates for this kind of thing nowadays are the homosexual lobbies.

Let me take you through a wee arithmetical exercise to show why this might be. Imagine a town of 100 adults, of whom 12 are black and 88 white. Suppose every adult commits precisely ten crimes a month. Suppose also that every crime has one perpetrator and one victim; and that every perp selects his victims at random from among the other 99 townsfolk. How will this community's crime statistics break down by race of perpetrator and victim? You can do the math yourself quite easily, but here are the results:

white on white — 773
black on white — 107
white on black — 107
black on black — 13

A lot of people find this result counter-intuitive. Since there are so many fewer blacks than whites, shouldn't they be committing fewer of the inter-racial crimes? Ah: But perps of both races have far more white victims to choose from than black: It’s 88 versus 11 for black perps, 87 versus 12 for whites. Without any ill intentions at all-without any “hate,” in fact-the inter-racial crime rate breaks even. And this is assuming that blacks and whites are equally prone to commit crimes. If in fact, as Department of Justice statistics show, blacks commit crime at a higher per capita rate than whites, we shall have a majority of inter-racial crimes being black-on-white. So it proves. The most recent year for which the National Crime Victimization Survey issued a full report was 1994. In that year blacks committed 1,600,951 violent crimes against whites, while whites committed 165,345 violent crimes against blacks. Less than 15 per cent of these inter-racial crimes had robbery as a motive; the great majority were assaults and rapes. "Hate crime,” anyone?

Now look at the gay vs. straight numbers. There are occasional cases of rough-housing homosexual gangs beating up on straight people. (You'll have to trust me on this; such cases don't make the ten-o'clock news.) However, the converse is much more common. All such offenses fall within the common laws of assault and battery, though, and it is hard to see why anything more is needed- much less what all this has to do with the regulation of commerce among the several States.

In Northern Ireland the police have a cute little expression they use when compiling statistics: “ODC.” This stands for "ordinary decent criminals,” as opposed to terrorists. A terrorist blows the arms and legs off old ladies at bus stops to make a political point (a sort of First Amendment exercise, really); an ODC just wishes to help himself to someone else's property. Presumably our own national and local police forces will now have to adopt a version of this terminology, distinguishing between ODCs and those possessed by the demon “hate.” Yet unless "hateful" words are spoken, and reliably reported (which they rarely could be in cases of murder), how are we to tell who is who? And, come to think of it, suppose a perp, having uttered hateful words and then tied up his victim, realises that those words, if reported to the authorities, will get him additional time in the slammer — "a decade or more" in the case of the New York bill, says the Times? Would there not then be an addition to the already strong temptation upon him to eliminate the evidence — so that the perpetrators of "hate crimes" will actually be more likely to kill their victims? There is another law in play here: the Law of Unintended Consequences. Alas, our dimwit legislators have no power to repeal that one.