HATE CRIMES

Hate crimes committed on Blacks vs. Hispanics/Latinos

Hate crimes committed on Blacks vs. Hispanics/Latinos

In this study I am going to compare hate crimes committed against blacks/latinos/hispanics by others.

Reported hate crimes are on the rise in the United States, and African Americans continue to be victims of such acts more often than any other group, experts said today. A review of federal crime records indicates that from 1991 to 1997, 40 percent of hate crimes were committed against African Americans, 15 to 20 percent involved religious targets, 9 to 14 percent gays, 5 percent Asians or Latinos, and less than 1 percent Native Americans or the disabled. (Aguirre and Turner, 1997)

Recently Latinos and Hispanics are being targeted by others. Murders of Latinos are increasing day by day. New Jersey State Police has recently in its report has showed that some Latinos groups were more likely to be involved in certain crimes. The research reports that Hispanics said they did not condone racial profiling, and have never condoned racial profiling, it is naive to think race is not an issue" in some sorts of crime. While Col. Williams claims not to condone racial profiling, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported in June, 1999, that it was a widespread practice: "Citing police statistics, case studies from 23 states and media reports, the organization asserts that law-enforcement agencies have systematically targeted minority travelers for search ... based on the belief that they are more likely than whites to commit crimes."

Although reports such as that of the ACLU which criticize the practice of racial profiling and criticize the "belief" that there may be race differences in criminality get wide media coverage, even being featured in national news magazines such as Time, (Bensinger (1992), other reports that deal with the actual incidence of crimes as related to race get short shrift. The nationally syndicated columnist Samuel Francis recently wrote:

Black Americans commit 90 percent of the 1.7 million interracial crimes that occur in the United States every year and are more than 50 times more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than whites are against blacks. These facts were the main findings of a study released earlier this month by the New Century Foundation, but they're not the really big news.

The big news is that the report, despite having been made available to virtually all newspapers and news outlets in the United States as well as to most major columnists and opinion writers, has been almost totally ignored by the national news media. The study was released on June 2 of this year. To date, all of one single news story about it has appeared. (Bensinger 1992). It does indeed seem strange for there to be a great disparity between media reports and the subsequent public apperception, and the actual data concerning one of the more important issues in criminology today.

The inconsistency between media reports and criminological data concerning race is not a new ...