There's been a recent spate of anti-gay hate crimes in NYC this month.
http://news.yahoo.com/york-city-seeing-spike-anti-gay-crime-officials-223749300.html
It's pretty shocking. A man was shot and killed in the Village, which is pretty much the gayest place in the country (except for maybe The Castro in San Francisco) for being gay. All of these attacks have happened in Manhattan below 42nd St, aka not the "bad parts" of the city, which makes it worse.
It makes me sad, it makes me worried, and it makes me angry.
I've seen people over the years argue against hate crimes being charged/prosecuted more harshly than if the same action were not done in hate. "How can you criminalize what someone thinks!" I wonder if those same people would feel the same way if they realized hate crimes are pretty much terrorism.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Craziness.
While hate crimes are not cool, I'm skeptical that punishing people more harshly does any good. Prison seems better suited to breeding crime than preventing it.
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C-x C-s C-x k RET
Right, but we do have prisons whose goal is partially punitive. In that environment, I think there's an argument for treating "hate" as a kind of premeditation. We're also not really talking about punishing "thought" so much as "action if you can demonstrate a particular kind of motive," which I can see the libertarian horror at, but it still relies on an underlying action. And I'm pretty sure nobody supports hate violence.
I'm really baffled by all the hate crimes. But it seems like they're unrelated to one another? I'm wondering how much of it is an uptick in random hate-violence and how much of it is media-spotlight bias. (That is: That such things were happening the whole time, but now that one outlier got reported, the others can be used to construct a trend piece, so relatively commonplace things are being reported as uncommon.) 'Cause it seems like craziness, and that just isn't likely.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
I dunno, even if the normal media wouldn't report it as much, I feel like gay-specific news sites would. And the media is only picking up on the trend after one of the crimes involved murder, which was the 6th incident.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
I feel like the function of prisons ought to be to keep dangerous people out of society in order to minimize danger to society. If that were the only criterion though, we could punish haters *before they even did anything*. And since we don't want to see that, then hate probably isn't a crime and therefore I'm not sure hate crimes deserve harsher punishment. Or maybe they deserve it but it wouldn't be particularly just to apply it on a mega scale like a country.
You don't feel like prison has a role as a deterrent?
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
I read that the two primary deterring factors for crime are certainty of punishment and swiftness of application of punishment. It makes sense -- you don't steal somebody's purse at a police convention. The punishment is too certain (and beatings will probably be swift).
I do this differently in my home life though. For example, I get more mad at Ben's cousin, Noah, when he's mean to Ben because it's almost like a hate crime. He's a mean kid in general and if he pushes Ben down I get a lot more upset than if somebody who's normally nice pushed Ben. You could say I am sensitive to hate crimes there. I just don't know if it's right for the state, who has a monopoly on legitimate violence and who rarely knows anything about the people it's punishing, to go this far.
Well in theory they do know a good deal assuming the case goes to trial (which I realize is a big assumption). That's why I liken it to a form of premeditation: We trust the state to distinguish murder from manslaughter, which is all about intent.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
Also we're up to six? I thought it was like two.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
No, the murder was the 6th one. We're up to 9 in just May.
What makes something a hate crime is how it affects people outside the crime itself. If someone premeditated and murders his wife, that doesn't affect me or my safety. But if someone kills someone just for being gay/black/female, etc, that affects the whole community.
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"You can't keep throwing people at your problems, dear." - Emma Frost to Colossus
~Jacehan~
I thought what defined a hate crime was the reasoning behind the action? As in, these crimes were committed on gay people SOLELY because they are gay. Right?
Regardless, these things really are not okay, but I think they will eventually become less and less common. I guess we can call them "growing pains" of things like marriage equality.
Still not okay with it at all though...
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Well, there is a new accent of n00b language. It's called: Vet LUEser goes Foreign!-MegaSpy22
Those must be the pants of the gods!-Digitalpython
Oh yeah, I guess we have tons of existing anti-intimidation laws too.
So there are lots of reasons to prosecute hate crimes.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
But those two things are intertwined, LP. When a crime is committed on someone solely because they belong to a certain group, it intimidates and threatens that whole group.
I suppose prosecuting hate crimes using additional charges of anti-intimidation and anti-terror instead of labeling them "hate" would be more effective.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
I tentatively agree with James.