The merest taint

A useful article on a topic about which I have written before - The communication gap which arises when we fail to use language precisely and to measure phenomenon rigorously.

From The Hate-Crime Epidemic That Never Was: A Seattle Case Study by Wilfred Reilly. It is an article of faith in some quarters that the US is an institutionally racist nation in which anyone outside the demographic plurality is subject to repression and discrimination.

All human systems discriminate, everywhere around the world, for all time. In a world of limits, it is unavoidable. I prefer to work with family over friends, friends over unknown strangers, unknown strangers over hostiles. All because I cannot have perfect knowledge of everyone's goals, competencies, and moral constraints. I will always attach a premium to the known over the unknown.

The real concern is whether people cultivate and indulge an irrational hatred or malevolence for others based on nothing connected to the individual's own actions. And there are such individuals in the US and we need to be mindful and careful of them. But they are blessedly rare and cursedly difficult to identify. And our conditions are better than virtually anywhere else in the world. Put differently, I am more likely to be accepted at face value by a higher percentage of people in the US than anywhere else. We are markedly tolerant of differences and of deviance from norms.

Regrettably, we have very poor mechanisms for identifying, measuring and prioritizing hate crimes. And we have people running around wanting to incite fear who are completely willing and eager to try and raise alarms.

Two drunks in a bar get into a fight and one of them invokes an ethnic or religious slur - is that a hate crime? We define and measure it differently by jurisdiction Some places include it as a hate crime, some omit it as incidental to the underlying physical altercation. But those trying to make the case that the US is institutionally racist will always try and increase the numbers.

This was most recently on display after the election of Donald Trump. Left leaning journalists tautologically expected there to be an increase in hate crimes because . . . well, just because. Numerous articles were printed immediately following the election results and for the next few months, seizing on any possible instance. Only to discover, once the real results were out, that the rate of hate crime commission actually fell.

Seattle apparently has a good number of people eager to find proof for their belief in the evil of the American system and Americans in particular. Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for everyone else, America is a pretty fair and open nation and there really isn't much hate crime going on.

The Seattle Times recently reported that an epidemic of hate crimes is taking place in the Emerald City. According to the newspaper, more than 500 bias incidents were reported to Seattle police in 2018 alone, and this figure represents “an increase of nearly 400 percent since 2012.” However, this widely circulated claim is, at the very least, misleading. An examination of the Seattle data indicates that fewer than 40 actual criminal cases resulting from real, serious hate incidents were successfully prosecuted between 2012 and 2017. This provides an excellent case study of how media coverage of flash-point issues such as hate crime can—whether intentionally or not—sensationalize and exaggerate the urgency of social problems.

In the Times piece, headlined “Reported Hate Crimes and Incidents up Nearly 400% in Seattle Since 2012,” reporter Daniel Beekman suggests that the problem continues to get worse, estimating that since 2017 alone, hate cases have jumped 25 percent. He also reports that “community organizations say hate crimes are a serious issue,” and cites sources claiming that “more support from the city” is needed to battle hate crime. Beekman’s tone is relatively measured. But others have delivered more alarmist takes, creating fear that minority residents may be swept up in an “epidemic” of hate.

A look through the data that has been made available from Seattle’s office of the City Auditor reveals that there is little basis for panic. First, most of the situations contained in the 500-plus documented incidents for 2018 turned out not to be hate crimes at all. Out of 521 confrontations or other incidents reported to the police at some point during the year, 181 (35 percent) were deemed insufficiently serious to qualify as crimes of any kind. Another 215 (41 percent) turned out to involve some minor element of bias (i.e., an ethnic slur used during a fight), but did not rise to the definition of hate crime. Only 125, or 24 percent, qualified as potential hate crimes—i.e., alleged “criminal incidents directly motivated by bias.” For purposes of comparison: There are 745,000 people living in Seattle, and 3.5-million in the metro area.

Even that 125 figure represents an overestimate, at least as compared to what most of us imagine to be the stereotypical hate crime (of, say, a gang of white racists beating up someone of a different skin color). Seattle’s remarkably broad municipal hate-crime policies cover not only attacks motivated by racial or sexual animus, but also those related to “homelessness, marital status, political ideology, age and parental status.”

Indeed, if there is a single archetypal Seattle hate incident that emerges from this data, it would seem to involve a mentally ill homeless man yelling slurs at someone. According to the City Auditor, 22 percent of hate perps were “living unsheltered” at the time of their crime, 20 percent were mentally ill, and 20 percent were severely intoxicated.

The conviction rate in cases such as these has been very low. As Beekman notes, 398 reports of actual hate crime, i.e. instances of “malicious harassment” that were “verified by the Department,” occurred between 2012 and 2017. Of these, 128 were referred for prosecution, indicating authorities’ baseline belief that the accusation was not a hoax and that the police had managed to identify and apprehend a viable suspect. But not all of those cases were prosecuted. And only 37 of those that were prosecuted resulted in a conviction for malicious harassment between 2012 and 2017. That is an average of about six per year—fewer than half of which likely involved a sane, sober, non-homeless offender. That’s hardly an epidemic of hate.

521 cases of possible bias distill down to six charged and convicted cases, of which half are committed by the homeless, mentally ill, or drunk.

Three proven cases of hate crime in a city of 750,000 or 3,500,000 depending on whether you measure by city limits or metro area. One way or another, that is astonishingly open and welcoming. 3/3,500,00 = the merest taint.