Argumentative Essay on Hate Crime Legislation: Rough Draft

Our government is responsible for increasing our country’s safety against hate crimes by strengthening current hate crime legislation, despite the limitation of our freedoms that might bring on. Since the Hate Crime Statistics Act was established in 1990, the number of hate crimes reported has consistently ranged around 7,500 or more annually. According to a new study by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, this approximates to nearly one every hour of every day. Therefore, it seems that for every hate crime that is occurring, there is another one being plotted. Some feel that hate crime legislation will inhibit free speech, while others believe that establishment of stronger hate crime legislation will, more importantly, decrease crime rate. hate crimes target people of different race, religion, gender, sexual orientation (most recently changed to also include the transgender community) and even those who exhibit a disability. These crimes range from name calling and vandalizing, to murder. As a witness of such crimes, I support the establishment of more improved hate crimes laws. With the establishment of stricter laws, instances such as the murder of Matthew Sheppard, a student of the University of Wyoming, will be less likely to occur. Even though the laws would be a form of policing our thoughts, as some claim, policing our thoughts leads to policing of actions which will result in fewer crimes committed because people will learn, at some point that their actions have consequences.
Crimes that result because of hatred or prejudice against others has been a reality for thousands of years, beginning as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (maybe even further), with the crimes committed against Native Americans by the Europeans and continuing on until today. Most of them stem off of religious and ethnic biases, especially those committed in the United States. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), however, the term Hate Crimes did not become a part of vocabulary, specifically in the United States, until the 1980s, when emerging hate groups, like the Skinheads, began committing numerous bias-related crimes. The first recorded "hate crime" occurred in 1922. The Federal Bureau of Investigation encountered a rising Ku Klux Klan, white supremacist movement in Louisiana. Two people were kidnapped, tortured and murdered while thousands more received threats. Although the term has recently been defined, world history has, in a sense, been defined by such crimes. From the Romans’ persecution of Christians; the Nazis’ “final solution” for the Jews and the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and genocide in Rwanda to the hate crimes being committed today against gays, blacks, Jews and any one else who doesn’t meet the attackers’ “approval”, these crimes have been, pretty much, the foundation of history.
Since the 1980’s, the United States public has become more aware of the problem of hate crimes, because of the media. Two specific tragedies initiated this heightened awareness. One was the shooting death (by a local KKK leader) of controversial radio talk show host Alan Berg in Denver, Colorado, in 1984 and two years later, the attack of three African-American men—one who died after being chased in front of a car —after their car broke down in a white New York City neighborhood called Howard Beach. These crimes (with help from the media) caused the problem of hate crimes to be taken more seriously on State and National levels. Hate Crimes have certainly received increased importance during the past decade as more crimes began being committed against certain types of groups or individuals and even though it is not fully defined the same way in all states- all definitions imply that the crimes were committed because the victim was “different”. Although many agree that hurting someone because of who they are is wrong, the current issue with hate crime legislation arises because of the ambiguity and differences in the definition of a hate crime.
People began using the term "hate crime" because it encompasses crimes committed against many different social and ethnic groups.The Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 defines hate crimes as “crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, including where appropriate the crimes of murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, simple assault, intimidation, arson, and destruction, damage or vandalism of property.” However, not all states adopted this definition. For example, some include disabled people and gender while others do not. The vagueness of the definition allows for confusion between a bias-motivated crime and expression of a thought (which is protected under the U.S. Constitution). However, a major difference between a hate crime and any other crime is that a hate crime does not only affect the one or few people that were attacked, but it also affects the certain group the victims were a part of. A bias-motivated offense will cause an amount of discomfit among members of a targeted group, and a violent hate crime will just cause terror among the certain community because they will feel that “others are out to get them”. Apart from their psychological impacts, violent hate crimes can more violence in the sense that the attacked group might feel obligated to retaliate- making the problem even bigger. Therefore, criminal acts motivated by bias may carry far more weight than other types of criminal acts, so it is required that such crimes receive more severe punishment than a non-bias related hate crime.
Distinguishing between a bias and non-bias related hate crime does require policing of our thoughts, which is what critics of stronger hate crime legislation oppose, but it is essential because policing of thoughts allows deference of the certain actions that are truly what the laws are there for- to prevent ate-related thoughts from becoming an action. Legislation does not suppress free speech because the law is motivated by the desire to equalize a greater harm that is inflicted by bias-inspired thoughts, not by an attempt to suppress the expression of thoughts. In an attempt to minimize this issue, “many jurisdictions have established hate-crime units in their police departments”, and some regional task forces are spending their time investigating hate crimes. Some States have increased law enforcement training on hate crime and utilize school- and community-based prevention programs and many nonprofit organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, have also helped with prevention programs, services to victims, and civil lawsuits filed on behalf of victims against hate-crime perpetrators. But this is not enough.
In Attempt to limit the increasing amount of Hate Crimes committed, the United States government enacted certain laws are designed to punish the act, not the thought behind the act. The Supreme Court has ruled that while a defendant's bias cannot be used as evidence of guilt, it can be used to help establish a motive, which is an important aspect of any criminal case. For example, The Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, established by President Clinton, states that the Attorney General has to collect data of crimes committed which were “motivated by prejudice based on: race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability of the victim.” Another law called the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007, requires that “anyone who commits a crime due to actual of perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability, can be sentenced to no more than ten years, unless kidnapping, attempted kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse, attempted aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill is involved.” Additionally, the 1969 Federal Hate Crimes Law, which now includes the transgender community because of the Matthew Sheppard Act of 2009, punishes those who "willingly injures, intimidates or interferes with another person, or attempts to do so, by force because of the other person's race, color, religion or national origin" and because of his/her attempting to engage in one of six types of federally protected activities, such as attending school, patronizing a public place/facility, applying for employment, acting as a juror in a state court or voting” with imprisonment or payment of a fine. And The Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (which only applies to federal crimes) requires the United States Sentencing Commission to increase the penalties for hate crimes committed on the basis of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, or sex of any person. The FBI also gathers data for Hate Crime Statistics.
I propose that first; even more research to be done so that we can include all of what makes a hate crime a hate crime. The Passage of the Matthew Sheppard’s Act, which changed the 1969 Federal Hate Crimes Law to include the transgender community in its definition of a hate crime, is proof that only with research and action can we make improvements. Also, a problem arises from the enactment of laws that require gathering information to give statistics because, firstly, the statistics are probably inaccurate due to underreporting and secondly, information about the statistics is not readily available to the public, so many are not completely aware of what is going on around them. So, we need to make statistics available to everyone. It is difficult to tackle the problem of under reporting, so the government should find ways to accommodate that (by, for example, being more exact with the information they do have and distributing that information). The penalties for hate crimes are severe but it does not make sense that laws apply in some cases and not others. A hate crime is a hate crime, it should not be punished based on where it happened, or how it happened, or whom it happened to, rather it should be based on why it happened- and if the only way to do that is by monitoring our thoughts then that’s allowed. After all, our actions are based on our thoughts.