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Strange Fruit: Crime Statistics, Hate Crime Reporting, Hoaxes and the Spinning Flow of Information on the Internet in the Media Age

By Theresa Petrey, Esq. (all)

During the fourth Ellensburg Film Festival, I had the opportunity to watch the documentary Trouble the Water which chronicles the experiences of Kimberly Richards Roberts during Hurricane Katrina and afterwards. Kim and her husband, Scott, ultimately return to New Orleans. At the request of my son, I watched another film immediately afterwards, V for Vendetta at home. The juxtaposition of the two films was troubling and jarring, as was the content and implications of both films, one documentary the other fiction. Trouble very clearly demonstrates the crushing scale of the problems of being black and poor in America. Vendetta explores a fictional British future where a nazi-like christian movement persecutes the many with explicit focus on the gay population and the world is somehow redeemed by the twisted terrorism of a misogynistic victim, V, of government torture camps performing grotesque medical experiments.

I'm one of those Americans still doing the slow burn over Katrina. It's amazing to me that Michael Chertoff survived the aftermath of Katrina with his job intact. But, more frustrating to me is the underlying conundrum that occurs because our focus often times gets diverted from bigger problems to placing a lot of emphasis on smaller problems, societally and numerically speaking. And, at the risk of a lot of accusations of homophobia being turned my way, I'm frustrated over the amazing amount of air time that gets devoted to reports of a hate crime against a gay person and the seeming reticence of the media to cover other issues and other types of hate, discrimination and prejudice. Specifically, I'm thinking of the Jena incident and how difficult it was for that story to get picked up.

This is compounded by having three very personal experiences, two relating to reported anti-gay hate crimes, one now a known hoax and insurance fraud case and the other that was likely in my opinion to be a hoax. Both involved acts of vandalism. The third experience was a direct personal experience of witnessing and trying to intervene in horrific anti-African African and Anti-Hispanic intimidation in a Florida laundromat a year ago which left me physically shaking. No one, not even the onsite management, bothered to try to stop this person but me. I just decided to leave and go on with my visit. Debating whether it was worth making the call to police internally, I finally decided the person was most likely mentally ill.

The likely gay hate crime hoax involved the media rushing to my apartment building to cover an alleged act of homophobic vandalism which could have just as easily occurred at any other business on the street, but curiously happened in the sole fifteen minute interval the gay rights campaign worker stepped out two nights before the city was set to vote on adopting a gay civil rights or domestic partnership ordinance. While I was putting my child on the bus, the activists were lining up to give statements to a television crew on how terrible and hateful the environment was there just a few feet away. When asked by the reporter about the incident, I very honestly explained that I had seen no evidence of any kind of harassment of the campaign, no anti-gay demonstrations, and nothing to indicate that the brick being thrown through the window was any different than the two previous bricks that were thrown through the windows across the street. I also explained that I liked living there and that I was an educated and caring person raising children upstairs.

Thankfully, coverage was nominal and life went on. The ballot measure quietly passed. It was and remains inexplicable to me why the property management company or the street level business owners and employees with plate glass windows never picked up the bricks that were being pushed up and loose around the street trees. Of course, there is nothing that can deaden the pain for any true victim of a hate crime and their loved ones. And, I do not mean to minimize the experiences of real victims in any wa1y, particularly those in the gay community.

On the other hand, hate crime hoaxes have been seized upon by many for their own uses which range from the merely political to the truly hateful. The internet amplifies this exponentially. Curiously, the best information on how to spot a hate crime hoax appears to be most easily found on a Mexican American Supremacist website that appears to be Anti-Semitic. So in the effort to bring a little more clarity to the situation, or, at least a little more thoughtfulness I offer the following True or False Questions and links.

1) There were over 1000 violent hate crimes reported against Gays in 2006. True or False?

It depends on how you define "violent." Statistically speaking, using the data the FBI collects, its false if you limit violent crime to to murder, forcible rape, aggravated assault and simple assault. But, if you include intimidation, which is essentially threatening behavior creating fear, the number does rise over 1000. There were no reported hate crime murders against gays in 2006.

2) Matthew Shepard's murder was reported as a hate crime. True or False?

False. Wyoming has no state hate crime laws thus there is no reporting of hate crimes including that high profile murder. Note also, that even though there may be multiple causes or motivations for a particular crime, simple statements showing that the perpetrator had a bias can transmogrify an otherwise random or planned crime into the something more of a hate crime. Bias does not have to be the only cause to trigger a hate crime report in those jurisdictions with hate crime laws on the books that do report. Thus, even though ABC's 20/20 raised the issue of a methamphetamine deal gone awry, previous sexual contacts between victim and perpetrator, and the really strange "gay panic defense" theory wherein a person so completely looses it upon being propositioned by a homosexual that they are temporarily insane, in the Matthew Shepard Case it still could have been reported as a hate crime if Wyoming had a law on the books. The "gay panic defense" also seems to have morphed into the "gay panic motivation" in the Lawrence King murder suspect's trial.

3) African Americans are the group most likely to experience hate crimes according to reported Statistics. True or False?

True. Racial hate crimes are the predominant category of reported hate crimes with African Americans remaining as the most targeted group. The second most prevalent category is religion with crimes against Jewish people leading that category.

4) Hate crimes make up a substantial portion of all crimes. True or False?

False. There were 25 million crimes in 2006 committed against people over the age of 12 years old. 6.1 million were categorized by the Department of Justice as being violent. There were 7,720 reported hate crimes in 2006 with 60 percent being recorded as being a crime against persons which includes "intimidation."

Interestingly, according to the DOJ summary reports for 2006, " Between 2001 and 2005, American Indians experienced violence at rates more than twice that of blacks, 2 1/2 times that of whites, and more than 5 times that of Asians." In an earlier study, DOJ, reported the following: "At least 70% of the violent victimizations of American Indians are comitted by persons not of the same race-a substantially higher rate of interracial violence experienced by white or black victims." Yet, the hate crime reporting statistics reflect very few hate crimes against American Indians.

5) A black cannot commit a hate crime against another black. True or False?

False. Although few are reported in the official statistics, there ARE cases of same race upon on same race hate crime. However, these cases are statistically insignificant in the hate crime reporting statistics.

Overall, Blacks still experience the highest rate of violent crime in the general crime statistics. And the rate of black on black crime is higher than the rate of white on white crime. Crimes against both blacks and whites have been on a downward trend overall.

6) Hoaxing incidents or other falsities are included in the hate crime reporting statistics. True or False?

Probably true. I have been unable to uncover any information that indicates that hoaxes have been backed out of the figures. It's also unclear that any significant statistical reporting of hate crime hoaxes has been done. Laird Wilcox, did however, publish an anthology of anti-gay and anti-semitic hate crime hoaxes entitled Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America many years ago. Wilcox appears to have devoted himself to equal opportunity skepticism of all politcal extremes and movements.

Full post as published by The Law Blawg of Theresa Petrey, PLLC on October 18, 2008 (boomark / email).