Meandering research on hate and crimes

Just how much hate, racism, etc. is there in America? The SJW claims are extreme and unmoored in reality, but what is the truth? What proxies might get you to something like the truth?

Violent crime statistics are readily available and pretty dramatically opposite the popular SJW message. It is not popular to point this out but those numbers are hard to undermine if people will listen to them at all in the first place. But let's set those aside for a minute and try and get at the subtler, and possibly more pervasive issues of hateful ideologies.

I won't go so far as the SJW for whom any countervailing opinion is triggering and endangering. It would appear that these people simply have some sort of psychological problem.

No, I am more interested in actual intimidation, assault, patterns of behavior that are intended to achieve some sort of ideological outcome. Not bar fights where insults are hurled. How common are sustained acts of ideological oppression and bigotry? How many people have robes in the closet or sit around talking about bringing harm to others because of their skin or their religious beliefs, etc.?

These are incredibly hard numbers to find.

I have in the past looked at the numbers for those formally charged with hate crimes. I have my suspicions about that whole process. It seems from all accounts that being charged with a hate crime is highly context dependent, usually part of the charging strategy and discretion of the District Attorney, and nearly random. I have seen cases where it was very clear from the evidence that victims were chosen specifically for an attribute (they were white or black or LGBT or Christian, etc.) but the perpetrators are not charged with a hate crime, usually because that is harder to prove and the actual underlying crime is open and shut. If you are the DA, why complicate the case with a more difficult charge? You have limited resources.

Likewise, it appears that some are charged with hate crimes simply to increase the charge list in the hope of striking a plea deal.

So all sorts of issues that call into question whether convictions of hate crimes are an adequate proxy for hate.

I tend to dismiss hate crime statistics as informative. I think they both undercount and over-count without predictable patterns. If you do accept hate crime convictions as a proxy, then the conclusion has to be that hate crimes are vanishingly few, declining, and that the patterns of those crimes do not support the SJW view of a white monolithic culture keeping down people of color. Anti-semitism remains a big deal, though we no longer talk about it.

In 2014, there were 5,479 hate crime incidents (a third property related and two thirds violence against individuals). That's in a country with some 310 million citizens and 20.7 million total crimes (about 25% against individuals and 75% against property). 0.02% of all crimes are hate related. That's simply noise in the system. Significant to the victims but not systemic or predictable.

For me, all that demonstrates is the unreliability of formal hate crimes as a proxy for assessing the degree of hate in America.

At this point, I am getting pretty far up the data creek and I still don't have much of a paddle.

It occurs to me that perhaps you could do a head count of certain notorious groups. How many Aryan Brotherhood members are there? How many active members of the KKK? Its easy to treat the KKK as a minuscule relic, but are they? The Aryan Brotherhood has 10,000 members, in and out of jail. The KKK has about 5,000 members scattered around the nation.

The first issue I have with these numbers is that they are not very empirical, more guestimates really, and that they are used by groups who have a real stake in magnifying the threat. But let's use them as a weak proxy.

The other problem is that I recognize AB and KKK but how many other groups are there out there and how many are actually not in prison?

Yet further up the creek, I am.

At this point it occurred to me that there is a group who does track hate groups and crimes, The Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC has a storied history fighting for civil rights but in recent decades it has seemed to devolve almost into a parody of an hysterical SJW group, frightened of and demonizing anybody who doesn't adhere to their ideology. I have long been deeply skeptical of any of their numbers as they have an SJW expansive definition of hate groups and hate crimes. Anybody who does not subscribe to the Frankfurt School of Reform Marxism seems to fall into their catchment. The Catholic Church, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, church goers, anti-crime groups, libertarians, people opposed to open borders immigration, Jewish groups, people concerned about terrorism, the Family Research Council, etc. SPLC is a far left group, well funded, and they have both a financial and ideological stake in exaggerating the extent of hate crimes and hate groups in the US. At a peevish level, I have also found it quite irritating that they posture themselves as fighting hate and yet their words and actions often seem to drip with disdain and hate as they demonize those with differing opinions from their own.

That said, why not start with their expansive definition and whittle it back? If anyone has a stake in categorically measuring hate, the SPLC does. So I visited the SPLC website for the first time in more than a decade. Fascinating.

They are very sophisticated in their data presentation and it is actually quite useful once you get past the posturing and the ideology. They claim that there are some 892 hate groups in America, down some 10-15% in recent years. They have a Hate Map where you can view hate groups by state.

I started with Georgia. There are 10.1 million Americans in Georgia. How many hate groups in Georgia? According to the expansive definition of the SPLC, there are 39 hate groups operating in Georgia. 14 are Black Separatist groups, 3 KKK, 2 Neo-confederacy groups, 4 Neo-nazi groups, 3 White nationalists, 2 Anti-Islamic groups, 2 Anti-LGBT, 2 Christian groups, and 2 general hate groups. That's quite a mixed bag.

No membership numbers. Other than Nation of Islam, KKK, and Skinheads, none with any sort of activities or presence in the state media. I clicked through on a couple to understand quite what we are dealing with. One of them is the League of the South which is either, according to the SPLC, "rabid, writing about potential violence, criticizing perceived Jewish power, and warning blacks that they would be defeated in any “race war”" or a traditionalist group deeply interest in Anglo-Celtic history if you accept their own definition. It seems hard to mesh the SPLC's description with the fact that the Southern League was founded by a bunch of PhDs at a Historically Black College or with their description at Wikipedia. Frankly, it looks like a traditionalist group that does not fit with the SPLC SJW ideology. Certainly there seems no concerted actions to bring violence to anyone.

I simply do not know and it may be that it is my ignorance at play here. But I suspect not. One of the challenges with the SPLC is that they tend to be very anti-First Amendment. They classify groups as Hate Groups simply for speech. Which is what makes SPLC kind of creepy. Very repressive.

My inclination, looking at the SPLC data and stripping out groups who are there simply because they are not Reform Marxists, is to cut the group number from 39 to perhaps 20. Skinheads, Anti-LGBT, Neo-nazis, perhaps Black Separatists, those all seem like the kind of hate groups that actually do things rather than just talk.

SPLC also has a Hate Incidents log. So how many incidents have there been in Georgia (remember, 10.1 million people)? Yikes! 62! Oh, never mind, that is over the past 13 years. About 5 incidents a year. Anything more than zero is too many but out of 10.1 million people, that's close to zero for the nearest approximation.

But is it really 62? Looking at the details, there is a lot of double counting. More importantly, most of the incidents are people saying things the SPLC doesn't like, handing out fliers, graffiti, holding rallies. Having gotten rid of the duplicate reports, there appear to have been 52 incidents in 13 years, four per year. Of these, 17 incidents were rallies or fliers being distributed by KKK, neo-nazis, etc. Objectionable, but entirely within the First Amendment. Omit these and we are down to 35 incidents in 13 years, about three a year.

23 of the incidents involve vandalism, generally spray painted graffiti on homes and cars, just under two a year. The biggest category of victims were Jews, with 48% of the vandalizations being anti-semitic. There were 10 assaults in the 13 years with 50% of these directed at LGBT victims (of the remaining, four victims were black and one was white). Finally there were two cross burnings.

In summary - even given the most expansive definitions of hate crimes, we are talking about a very small number of groups (perhaps 20 or less). They have virtually no presence in the media or in terms of what they do. They are objectionable groups no doubt. The pattern of violence and actual crimes apparently motivated by hate are very few, perhaps 35 over thirteen years. Jews are the biggest victims (from vandalism), LGBT are the next (from assault), and African Americans are next with 7 vandalisms (plus 4 assaults and two cross-burnings). The numbers are small and the patterns are mixed. Blacks, Whites, Hispanics are all contributors to this small portfolio of hateful crimes.

Where does this leave us? I can't quite say. Relying on an expansive definition of hate crimes it seems like we have a very small number of disorganized local groups who may, perhaps, make a lot of noise, but don't do much (2-3 incidents a year or 0.0008% of all crimes in Georgia in 2014), and rarely anything violent. These hate groups are swamped by run-of-the-mill crimes of which there were 365,949 in 2014.

The data would not seem to support, even when accepted expansively, that there is any sort of systemic pattern or volume of hate crimes or hate groups exerting any sort of power other than episodic and random crime.

Those SJW groups, who seek to bring attention and focus to hate, usually from an ideological commitment, are misdiagnosing the nature of the problem. A focus on hate crimes won't do anything to improve community quality of life that would not be achieved simply and more effectively by focusing on crime at large. You could bring hate crimes to zero and no one would notice because they constitute such an insignificant percentage of all crimes.