Your views on hate crimes

[roadrunner5877]

Hello All,
do you guys think its right to be charged more for doing the same type of crime for what was going though the bad guys mind at the time. example 1 bad white guy beats up anther white because he looked at him the wrong way example 2 bad white guy beats up a gay man because he is gay.

[Creeker]

Hello All,
do you guys think its right to be charged more for doing the same type of crime for what was going though the bad guys mind at the time. example 1 bad white guy beats up anther white because he looked at him the wrong way example 2 bad white guy beats up a gay man because he is gay.

I think that hate crimes laws are a dangerous slippery slope, brung upon us by rampant Political Correctness.

...and it really annoys me that I am forced to ad, "IMHO", another PC tagline designed to excuse my very un-PC convictions.

[Aussie George]

Very generaly speaking I think what is going on through someone's mind is very important to sentencing.

For instance. A guy gets in a fight in a bar and is drunk and takes exception to something said about his girl. He over reacts and punches a bloke in the face. The bloke he his falls down and knocks his head and dies.

Compare this to a guy who goes out and punches a guy in the face for no reason other than the puncher is big and strong and the guy he hits is wak and small. Once the weak guy is down, the big guy keeps hitting him and then stomps his head into the ground, killing him.

I would say the first guy's mtive and intent were greatly different to the second guy's and the community does not necessarily need the same level of protection from a guy who accidentally killed someone versus someone who goes out of their way to kill someone.

I am from Australia and we do not have "hate crime" laws as such. If you assault someone, then you assault someone, and the motives and intent are brought up in relation to that offence. Not that it matters either way, because the sentencing is pathetic whatever the motive.

In my town we have a problem with gangs of Aboriginal youths who roam the streets just looking for fights, generally with any white guy they can find, provided the white guy is alone. They fight twenty to one and once you are down, it is not over. They will stomp on you, kick you and hit you with things. They are savages. I would like to seem the penalised harder than someone who has an argument with their neighbour, and punches him in the face, but for a myriad of reasons, they don't seem to get any penalty, let alone one of a severe nature. The main reason being that they are juveniles and no that the law here is pathetic and they can't be touched. On top of that they also know that the victim's rarely make statements against them for fear of retribution, and if they do we have trouble identifying them due to their numbers and not being able to prove who did what in the melee. Fortunately our town is covered in a network of CCTV cameras, but they know where the cameras are and try and stay out of them.

[retdetsgt]

I worked hate crimes my last three years.

I have no problem with them. Hate crimes by definition are when someone is targeted as a victim only because of their race, religion, or sexual preference.

An example I used to use when I taught academy was when I was in the first grade in W. Texas, my mother bought me a long wool coat to wear to school. I walked in the room and some kid shouted that I was wearing a girl's coat. The fight was on and was on every recess that day.

I went home and told my Mom what happened and she got me another coat, one more appropriate for the region. No one ever said a word to me again.

I could solve the problem by not wearing that coat. If I had been Jewish, African American or whatever, I couldn't have changed that and I would be facing the same thing everyday.

I worked a lot of cases where fine people had the **** kicked out of them or their property destroyed merely because of who they were, not what they did. Had they not been a particular race, religion or whatever, they would have been left alone.

And FTIW, I worked cases where white people were attacked for being white, it applies to everyone. You have to distinguish between real hate crimes and crimes where the victim just happens to be of a different race, etc. But it's not that hard.

[Cat_Doc]

I agree with RDS that hate crimes, by their very nature, deserve increased punishment.

[shugs]

I enforce any law on the books, whether I like it or not, as writing laws is not my job. Having said that, hate is a feeling. Feelings are not illegal. The reason we have "hate crimes" laws today, is people were not properly charged and prosecuted in the past. If all crime was treated as crime and properly charged prosecuted and punished where a convicted is handed down, we wouldnt be dealing with hate crimes today. By that, I mean hate crimes as a law, not people who commit crimes because of hate. The same can be said of domestic violence.
Frankly, I could care less why someome rapes, robs, assaults or whatever else. There is no GOOD reason for doing it, so it shouldnt matter.

[Cat_Doc]

Frankly, I could care less why someome rapes, robes, assaults or whatever else. There is no GOOD reason for doing it, so it shouldnt matter.

I agree that anyone who commits rape, robbery, assault, should be punished.

However, I think that when someone does it simply and specifically because the victim is, for example, Jewish, Black, White, Arab, Japanese, Mexican, Catholic, Morman, homosexual, etc., then enhanced punishment is called for.

[retdetsgt]

Having said that, hate is a feeling. Feelings are not illegal.

Hate crimes are about motive. Hate is legal, committing a crime against someone just because you hate them isn't. Motive is always an element of a crime.

There is no hate crime where the same act against someone isn't also a crime. But the motive makes it a higher crime.

For example, burning a cross on a white man's lawn is a fairly low misdemeanor because it involves only some damage to the lawn. Doing the same thing to a black family's home is not only lawn damage, but a pretty nasty implied threat. Big difference.

If I were African American, especially living in a white area and someone burned a cross on my lawn, I would be fearful for the safety of my family and me. And for good reason based on acts by white, nutcase supremacists. As it stands now, being white and living in white neighborhood, I would view it completely different and just be pissed about my grass. Very little about the crime is the same because of the motive.

[retdetsgt]

In my town we have a problem with gangs of Aboriginal youths who roam the streets just looking for fights, generally with any white guy they can find, provided the white guy is alone. They fight twenty to one and once you are down, it is not over. They will stomp on you, kick you and hit you with things. They are savages.

That's not the way they depict them on National Geographic!

[Aussie George]

That's not the way they depict them on National Geographic!

Hmmm...

I should first clarify that I am referring to these groups of youths as savages by virtue of their behaviour, not their race.

As for what is portrayed on National Geographic and what is real...well it is kind of like comparing Blazing Saddles and a history lecture of the Wild West...they are nothing alike.

[retdetsgt]

H
As for what is portrayed on National Geographic and what is real...well it is kind of like comparing Blazing Saddles and a history lecture of the Wild West...they are nothing alike.

Heh, yeah, I know. Cat Ballou was a much better real life description.....

The problems stem from sociological issues, not racial. Portland likes to think of itself as super liberal and embracing diversity, but the fact is they are prejudice as hell. The African Americans here are treated as poor, ignorant pets, more or less. They are more than willing to throw money into feel good projects that do nothing, but for God's sake, don't move into my neighborhood or go to work for my company! The hypocrisy is nauseating. Little wonder gangs got such a foothold here.

I grew up in the segregated South. I never went to public school with a black kid. Places had restrooms marked, Men, Women and Colored. There were White and Colored drinking fountains. It was pretty awful.

[Cat_Doc]

I grew up in the segregated South. I never went to public school with a black kid. Places had restrooms marked, Men, Women and Colored. There were White and Colored drinking fountains. It was pretty awful.

You know, Jim, I grew up in Arizona and never really faced that issue here to any great extent. I will admit that the Mexican kids were given a hard time, predominately the non-English speakers who moved through with the different crop seasons. This was right in the middle of the civil rights movements and I distinctly remember watching the news on some of the marches and riots wondering what the hoopla was all about?

I never really experienced real racial hatred close up until I went in the Air Force in 1973. I remember one particular set of events that really upset me, but it was Black on Black. A very respectful and quiet Black guy in our Flight was from rural Mississippi. He caught an awful lot of grief from some of the northern big city (Detroit/Chicago/New York) Blacks who were especially vicious to him. It got to the point where a group of White airmen told them to back the F off. It was very foreign to me.

[retdetsgt]

I saw that in Portland too. I started right after the race riots here and there was still a lot of tension and it took nothing to spark an mini riot. But I noticed that young Black kids from the South were called "Rebs" by the locals and mistreated. I guess some people have to feel superior somehow. That's the read I get off White Supremacists. They are usually losers who look for someone else to blame for their sorry lives. I suspect that's the case with the Northern Black guys, they needed someone to feel "better than".

A huge chunk of the hate crimes I investigated were against gays and lesbians. We have quite a population here and young toughs of all races liked to go gay bashing downtown. Some of the attacks were pretty awful.

All in all, hate crimes were easy cases to work. The suspects were nearly always dumb as sticks no matter what their race.

The worst I had was some dumb****s started painting Swastikas on Synagogues. We had a few Holocaust survivors and their children. Having to face some of those congregations was no fun until I caught the morons doing it.

[Aussie George]

One of the big problems here is that a whole generation of Aboriginals were taken from their families as small children and raised as "whites". The idea by the European settlers was that the Aboriginal people were savages and it was for their own good. They were beleived to have no real culture because they had no written language and did not farm or anything else that Europeans at the time saw as civilised.

That whole generation grew up fearing white people on a massive level. Until 1969 Aboriginals were not even considered human as far as the census was concerned. They were counted on the fauna and flora lists. They could not vote, were restricted on who they could mix with and who they could speak to, where they could go and what they could do. This generation are still alive, although most are gone. Their children are now the Elders and still remember that hatred of what the whites did to them and have passed it on to their children and their children. It is this last generation that are now forming gangs.

What annoys me about this generation is most of them have forgotten (or never heard of) most of their cultural icons, have no idea about where they came from and live untirely off welfare. They have posters of Tu Pac and idiots like him and have no idea who Albert Namitjira, Eddie Mabo, David Gulpillil or David Uniapon are. (BTW, they are Aboriginal icons). They carve the Aboriginal flag into their arms (because they are too cheap to go and get proper tattoos) and carry on about being black, but are a disgrace to their own people and even their Elders are sick of it.

We have a Murri Court in this district. The Murris are the local Aboriginal people. The rules of Murri Court are that they have to admit the crime, and take the punishment. The punishment is handed out by Elders and is usually greater than normal courts.

While I feel sorry for those that were affected by the "Stolen Generation" and it must be terrible to lose that link to your culture, these latest ones are just using it as an excuse and have a chip on their shoulders. They carry on about being black and what it means to them while at the same time have no idea about their own people. I had one young smart mouth say to me the other day, "You have no idea about my culture." I called him out on it and asked him where his people were from and who his Elders were and he didn't have a clue....but he knows how to steal cars and sniff glue.

I'm just sick of people finding excuses to be a burden on society. We all had things go wrong in our lives or have been treated badly by someone in the past...well suck it up and get on with life, coz noone cares!!!



That is all

[retdetsgt]

What happened here was LBJ created the Great Society which was intended as a safety net of welfare until people could get on their feet. What happened was it gave people just enough money for doing nothing that they could survive if they supplemented it just a bit by a little bit of crime. There wasn't much incentive to pull yourself out of it and particularly when there was still racial prejudice when you left your neighborhood.

Included in the package was aid to dependent children which paid women so much money for each child in the house as long as the father wasn't living there. You can see what that encouraged and it pretty much demolished the traditional family in a lot of the African American community. Now you have a lot of fatherless kids growing up. We called them "garden kids". They were fed and watered and that was about all. They pretty much grew up on the streets. Of course many became thugs and even those that didn't are more or less unemployable because they have no education to speak of. The schools were scared to hold them accountable so most went through school without having to learn anything.

Meanwhile, the feds came in and set up programs that poured money into the neighborhoods, but did nothing to help people for the future. Charlatans from the area scooped up the federal money and stole the government blind, but legally. White bureaucrats thought they were being noble by giving them all this money that did nothing but perpetuate the problem.

I watched people go from teaching their kids work ethic and how to get a job to teaching them how to go on government assistance and how to scream to get what you want. And we have no one to blame but ourselves for setting up that goofy system. IMO, it played hell with a couple of generations of poor people of all races. I've yet to see a social service program ran by the government that didn't have all sorts of unintended consequences.

Somewhere in the attic, there's a thesis I wrote on the subject many years ago. It wasn't popular with my sociology professors, I can tell you that.