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Racial Hate Crimes
Written by Administrator Friday, 15 August 2008 16:42 |
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A racial hate crime is a crime committed to another person with the sole motivation of racial hate behind it. However, it is not just the color of a person’s skin that makes people commit racial hate crimes. It also includes cultures, languages, and nationalities.
Racial hate crimes are on the rise in the United States. Over half of the racial hate crimes committed are by people under the age of twenty-one. Examples of racial hate crimes are the 13 and 14 year old kids who spray painted swastikas on the homes of Jewish residents in Clifton, New Jersey, or the youth in Houston, Texas who admitted to the police that he shot a gay man because he hated homosexuals, and in Broward County, Florida a mob of partygoers beat to death a Vietnamese-American college student.
Organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti Defamation League have reported that racial hate crimes, such as vandalisms, bombings, murders, beatings, and cross burnings have increased at an alarming rate in the United States. In 1996 there were close to nine thousand hate crimes reported to the FBI.
Between May of 1990 and May of 1992 there were over two hundred serious hate crimes that occurred in the U.S. high schools. While few of the youths who committed the crimes belong to hate organizations there are some who belong to neo Nazi skinhead gangs. These gangs think that a race war against the Jews is the only solution.
Over the last fifteen years some cities and states in the U.S. have prohibited certain acts as hate crimes. In Minnesota, the following ordinance was passed in 1989, “Whoever places on public or private property a symbol, object, appellation, characterization, or graffiti including … a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm, or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender, commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
A crime that is committed against another person because of their race is classified as a ‘racially motivated’ or ‘racially aggravated’ offense. To be a victim of a racial hate crime you don’t have to be physically attacked or injured.
Once the offense has been committed if the crime is based on prejudice and racially motivated the sentence handed down may be more severe that for the same offense that was not racially motivated.
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 17 September 2008 16:05 ) | |
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