SPLC plays no role in determining whether prosecutors decide whether to charge a crime as a hate crime. However, we often express our views on such matters. In some cases, it is quite easy to determine if a crime is a hate crime: If someone publicly declares a desire to harm a stranger for being a member of a certain group, then does so, that rather clearly establishes a motive of class hatred. On the other hand, merely being a member of a particular group doesn’t automatically mean that a crime committed against you was motivated by hatred of your group — it might have been done because you were flashing money and the assailant wanted it. That would be a crime, but not a hate crime.

The case of Chrissy Polis is unclear in this regard — there have been contradictory allegations, some suggesting class hatred was involved (hate crime), some suggesting the fight was a personal dispute (non-hate crime). Whether or not SPLC “decides” this was a hate crime will depend not on the race and sex status of the attackers or the victim, but on what the evidence ultimately reveals, or what prosecutors ultimately charge.

By the way, hate-crime statutes are not written to protect “minority” groups. They address motivation in general — so, a black person who attacks a white person because they are white, or a gay person who attacks a straight person because they are straight, could face hate-crime charges just as easily as in the reverse.

As RLavigueur stated well, one of the key reasons for hate crimes statutes is the recognition that the entire group, not just the specific victim, suffers from heightened fear knowing that any one of them could be the next victim, not because of anything they did, but simply for who they happen to be (think of the Klan’s purpose in publicly displaying lynching victims). That effectively means that a hate crime has many more victims than a simple crime — and thus warrants more severe punishment.

Robert Steinback
Deputy Editor, Hatewatch

Good to know I’m not the only one that finds it hilarious that these people are posting on the SPLC site about how the potential hate crime that the SPLC is writing about is something the SPLC won’t write about because the victim was white. You see the same disconnect in Dick Lancaster stating that there’s no statistics on hate crimes against transgendered people without seeming to notice that the article links to an SPLC report which not only gives such statistics but names sources where more can be found.

Dick Lancaster,

See Ruslan’s comment, he did a good job explaining (again, since you ignored it the first time), how motive is a factor when sentencing in crimes. The slippery slope argument often becomes a logical fallacy, and in your case you’re not at all making it clear how punishing crimes where the motive was to attack an entire community, or to punish someone for being part of that community, will lead to a collapse of a functioning and fair legal system.

You are, I think, trying to make the argument that even if hate is the motive, that doesn’t make it a different crime and it should be treated the same as all crimes that share the same physical component as it. Imagine if we did this whenever someone was responsible for another person’s death, and did away with all of the differences in sentencing between premeditated murder, murder in the heat of passion, manslaughter when the intent was to harm but not to kill, and accidental killing through negligence.

I doubt you are making the argument that these activities should all be seen as equally criminal, but in all cases the result is the same: the culprit is responsible for the death of another human being. Giving a more serious sentence to hate crimes done to punish group membership or punish entire groups is no different, and as Ruslan mentioned, it serves a very important purpose in a world where we still have need of the term trans-bashing.

Dick, were you aware that motive is considered in cases when it comes to sentencing? For example, premeditated murder against a person who raped your wife is going to get a much better sentence compared to premeditated murder by someone who just wanted to know what killing someone felt like.

That’s what hate crimes laws do. They add a stiffer penalty to crimes where the motive was hatred for a particular groups. It sends a message to people- if you have a problem with other races, sexual orientations, etc., you had better keep it under control and not commit a crime against someone because of it.

Be honest Dick, are you trying to protect the rights of people who want to attack transgendered or gay people? Why else would someone deliberately not read the facts about these kinds of laws?

I would say that motive is almost always considered in criminal prosecution. It is not a separate crime. If “hate’ happens to be the motive, let it stand with jealousy, revenge or whatever the motive might be. If you make the motive of a crime a separate consideration in sentencing which could double or tripple your incarceration, then how much more will greed get you? Double? How about a crime of passion? Can we give incarceration credits? Slippery slope.

Of course, this is an indictment of what American society has become.

First, there are statistics about the victimization of transgender people, just not government statistics. If you want to see them for yourself, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs is one place to start, so is the National Centre for Transgender Equality.

Second, please define a crime committed with love. Your flippancy aside, a hate crime is punished more severely for two reasons. First, the crime is directed at someone for no other reason than that they had the misfortune of being the wrong race or religion or sexual orientation. Second, these crimes are often meant to spread fear through entire communities, and as such are similar in their motive to terrorism, which I doubt you’ll argue should be treated like any other murder because, really, who can guess at the motive of such an action?

Motivation is frequently an element in determining how severely a crime will be punished, this is why we have different degrees of murder, and why attacking someone just because they are trans is more serious than attacking someone who has actually done you harm.

Your oh so clever pie comment aside, hate crimes are rarely prosecuted as such precisely because courts are cautious in making that judgement, which doesn’t stop it from sometimes being apparent in the evidence. Courts constantly need to look for evidence to help them understand a criminal’s mindset. If I drive a car over someone and then claim that I didn’t see them there and won’t testify otherwise, the prosecutors aren’t going to throw in the towel if they have other evidence that I did it deliberately. Not being able to assume that I committed a crime out of hatred is not the same thing as not being able to gather evidence that I did so.

church,

As a warning, most transgender people find the use of dual pronouns extremely insulting. Trans people have a hard enough time having to deal with things like this as it is, the least we can do is show respect by using the pronouns which they themselves identify with. By your comment, I doubt you were attempting to be insulting, but it is something to be careful about.

Deep Ecology,

Very few sensible African American or LGBT people believe that it is impossible to commit a hate crime because of minority status. What makes a crime a hate crime is its motivation, not the status of who committed it. In this case, if it was hatred of transgender people which motivated the attack, this would be equally true if the culprits were white, black, male, female, gay, or straight; the animus or lack of animus is the same regardless.

In fact, it also is possible to be a victim of a hate crime without being part of the group against which the crime was directed. A straight person attacked because their attackers thought that they were gay would still be the victim of a homophobic hate crime, even though they are not gay themselves. Of course, things get more complicated in the courts, since hate as a motivation isn’t always easy to prove or confirm.

Since statistics do not exist to measure a trend, how can anything concerning that trend seem clear?

If one can be punished double or triple if the crime committed is done with hate, can a criminal be given a double or triple award if his crime is committed with love?

How is it determined what’s in the mind of an individual during the emotional commission of a crime when the law cannot presume an individual to know he has committed a crime when he pleads the 5th?

What is the threshhold that propells anger to hate? What instrument measures such an important threshhold?

I hate pumpkin pie. Can I be arrested if I drop one on purpose?

The problem for a lot of these bigots is that they don’t understand that “guy” and “girl” are sometimes misleading terms. If more people understood gender identity, things would be a lot better, but how are you going to teach them? One of the only places in America that transgender people are less welcome than bathrooms is in school curriculums. Same problem in Canada and most of the western nations that like to pride themselves on LGBT rights, hoping nobody will question the “T”.

The “cross-dressing men molesting women in bathrooms” meme has been brought up whenever trans people try to get basic protections against violence like this, it frequently sways legislators, despite there being no evidence that it has ever happened. Evidence of transgendered women being attacked by both men and women for using women’s bathrooms, and transgendered men being attacked by men for using men’s bathrooms, yes, but the bigots don’t consider this to be a problem.

Oh but their movement isn’t about hating other races, it’s just love for their own race.

I know it’s a little off-topic but that kind of glaring hypocrisy the WN movement displays every second just drives me up a wall.

There is little question looking at the video that a crime took place. The question of whether that crime is a hate crime is one of motivation, and the video does not clearly establish why Polis was attacked. If it cannot be established that Polis was attacked because of her race or transgender status (or some other hate-crime category, such as religion or nationality), then the crime could not be considered a hate crime.

Robert Steinback
Deputy Editor, Hatewatch

It’s great that the SPLC is covering these stories, but c’mon? MAY be a hate crime? Watch the video again…