Hatred as irrelevant

If there’s one thing the coronavirus outbreak has given us, it’s a greater sense of perspective. More than 600,000 U.S. deaths linked to COVID are sobering, especially in the context of other leading causes of death.

That’s why the latest FBI report on hate crime incidents looks even more like fabricated news than in the past. We now know the kind of numbers that any true pandemic-like affliction accumulates, and in relative analysis it’s painfully obvious that hate crimes are the furthest thing from epidemic proportions.

If covid had claimed the same death toll as hate crimes last year – just 22 nationally and zero in Arkansas – it would never have made local headlines, let alone garner national attention. .

And yet, most media feel compelled to report hate crimes, often with LARGE HEADLINE processing, despite its decidedly tiny population profile.

“Reports of hate crimes in the United States explode,” a CNN headline read. “Hate crimes in Arkansas increased in 2020,” a Yahoo News headline said. The Makato, Minn., Free Press published “Our Take: Rising Hate Crime Rate Affects Us All”. Let’s take a closer look at the alarming hate crime rate in Minnesota. There were a grand total of 194 hate crime incidents in the 2020 FBI report for the 5.7 million people of Minnesota. In the traditional “per 100,000 population” metric, this is a rate of 3.4.

Among the worst categories of violent hate crimes were zero murder, zero rape, one negligent manslaughter, five robberies and 44 aggravated assaults, for a rate of 0.88 per 100,000 population.

In the same regular violent (non-hate) crime categories in Minnesota for 2020, there were 14,589 incidents, with rates rising rapidly in three of the four categories. The 185 murders (a new state record) were 58% higher than in 2019, 3,885 thefts were 26% higher and 8,203 aggravated assaults were 22% higher.

Minnesota’s overall violent crime rate is 257.9, which is nearly 300 times (30,000%) higher than its violent hate crime rate.

And yet, in its editorial, the Free Press asserts that any hate crime is one crime too many. But over 14,500 violent crimes, right?

As is generally the case, Minnesota’s violent crime is concentrated in its largest cities. Of his 185 murders, for example, 114 (62%) took place in Minneapolis-St. Paul. No other police jurisdiction has reported double-digit criminal homicides.

This inverse relationship between a lack of newsworthy numbers and an overly sensational presentation is particularly infuriating in states like Arkansas where hate crimes are rarer than snakebites. The Arkansas “spike” that Yahoo News bragged about involved 11 more incidents in the previous year – but just two more violent hate crimes.

Eleven. Spread over three million Arkansans in 75 counties covering 53,179 square miles. As a percentage, Yahoo could complain, an increase from eight incidents in 2019 to 19 in 2020 is really a statistical spike (more than double). But why use percentages (which multiply by 100) instead of whole numbers? And why only look back a year?

The number of hate crime incidents in 2020 is only three more than in 2018 and five less than in 2017. Combining the last five years, Arkansas hate crime number in 2020 is less than three incidents above the average figure.

Since 2016, with some 3 million Arkansans scrambling in a besieged and racially-saturated political environment, violent hate crimes have averaged less than one per quarter.

In the past 10 years in Arkansas, there has been exactly one hate crime murder. Exactly hate crime theft. Exactly a hate crime gun violation.

For the 80 percent of the population who only read the headlines, it might sound like Arkansas has a problem with hate crimes. The real data screams otherwise.

In the last decade of FBI Uniform Crime Report numbers, however, the Arkansans have seen very real “spikes” in regular violent crime, not the imagined kind from Yahoo. Murders over the past four years were all higher than any year back to 1997.

Aggravated assault has been on the rise since 2016 and sets a new record every year. The overall violent crime index for Arkansas hit an all-time high in 2019, which is also a 29% increase since 2013.

There have been more murders in the last year (and in each of the past four years) in Arkansas than there have been total hate crimes (violent and non-violent) in the past 10 years combined. .

The omission or lack of perspective taints the truth in anything and can falsely distort perception.

From the outset, hate crimes legislation was a flawed political statement that made some victims less valuable than others.

“It is not hate that we criminalize with hate crime laws, but the mistake of directing it against the wrong groups,” wrote Paul Greenberg.

The real news is that hate crimes are among the rarest crimes in America. Despite an increase in the national population of 65 million people since 1995, there have been a few hundred fewer hate crimes in 2020 than 25 years ago.

This fact will not make the headlines. And that’s the problem.

Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.