VivirLatino

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Marcelo Lucero, Angie Zapata, Jorge Steven Mercado, Brisenia Flores, Jose Sucuzhañay, Luis Ramirez. These are just a handful of names of some hate crimes that got some coverage over the last year. Pero what makes a hate crime a hate crime? Who decides and what “standards” have to met? Will a national hate crimes bill, with harsher sentencing guidelines solve the root causes? How do we as radicals or even as “progressives” rationalize a desire to enforce longer sentences in prison, especially when a member of one of our communities is killed by another member of our communities (because we fit into multiple communities built around concepts of gender identity, race, ability, nationality, class, sexual identity, etc)?

According to the FBI’s recently released statistics on hate crimes in the United States, 64% of the hate crimes based on perceived ethnicity or national origin targeted Latinos. This is out of 7,783 hate crime incidents involving 9,168 offenses reported by 13,690 law enforcement agencies in 2008. Here are some more stats since people seem to like stats.

Single-bias incidents

Of the 7,780 single-bias incidents reported in 2008:

* 51.3 percent were racially motivated.
* 19.5 percent were motivated by religious bias.
* 16.7 percent stemmed from sexual-orientation bias.
* 11.5 percent resulted from ethnicity/national origin bias.
* 1.0 percent were motivated by disability bias.

Offenses by bias motivation within incidents

There were 9,160 single-bias hate crime offenses reported in the above incidents. Of these:

* 51.4 percent stemmed from racial bias.
* 17.7 percent were motivated by sexual-orientation bias.
* 17.5 percent resulted from religious bias.
* 12.5 percent were motivated by ethnicity/national origin bias.
* 0.9 percent resulted from biases against disabilities.

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