ON THE morning of November 18th, two swastikas and the words “Go Trump” were found daubed in a children’s playground in Brooklyn. This is one of 360 hate crimes being investigated by New York’s police department in 2016, an increase of 35% over 2015. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, has set up a special unit to tackle the “explosion” of such crimes in the state. In the Senate last month, Harry Reid, the minority leader, said that Donald Trump’s election had “sparked a wave of hate crimes across America. This is a simple statement of fact.” But look more closely and the facts become more difficult to establish.
Hate crime is defined by a 1990 law which classifies crimes against individuals or property that are in some part motivated by race, religion, ethnicity or sexuality. The law was tweaked in 2009 to include crimes against a person on account of their gender, gender identity or disability. While not all states recognise all these types of hate crime, in 2015 a total of 5,850 of them were recorded by the FBI. Hatred itself is not a crime, but crimes motivated by hate result in longer sentences. The vast majority...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2haBIl9
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