I Hate Hate Crime Laws 

Wednesday's Journal had the following article about hate crimes being hard to prove:

When the story got out that a black man had been severely beaten by a mob of off-duty white police officers this past fall, and that the victim said he suffered racial slurs along with kicks and blows, many people figured that the incident was the very definition of a hate crime.

So when prosecutors charged three Milwaukee police officers in the Oct. 24 beating of Frank Jude Jr., those same people - including some elected officials - expressed surprise and disappointment that a hate-crime enhancer wasn't included. The decision spotlights the high threshold of Wisconsin's hate-crime law and what prompts a prosecutor to use it or not. It also served as a reminder that provable facts might not always match public perceptions in high-profile cases.
...
"To anyone who reviews the whole police file, it is very clear these victims were selected because they were suspected in stealing a (police officer's) badge," McCann said. "If they had been white, black or red - if there had been two white men involved - the same thing would have happened."

Jude denies taking a badge, and none was found on him.
...
The complaint cites accounts of 12 witnesses, but none mentions racial taunting or slurs.

So this article of course talks about the difficulty in proving the fact that a crime is in fact a "hate crime". But more than that, I greatly disapprove of hate crime laws because... well... we already have laws against all these things already. Beating up a man was already illegal before hate crime legislation. The fact that the man was black, and the off duty cops were white doesn't make the crime any more heinous.

What if those cops were charged with a hate crime, and then same thing were to happen to me next week? Cops are white, I'm white... no hate crime there. The cops would go to jail for less time in my case... so does that mean that somehow my beating wasn't as bad? My broken bones must not hurt as much. I know... the cops would have had a better reason for beating me.... in my case it's more understandable.

This is just another area where we are attempting to regulate and outlaw someone's thought. For as much as we want to, that is the most dangerous of things to consider. Thinking something is not, and should not, ever be illegal. Taking harmful actions based on those thoughts can be. But at that point, we can only punish the actions, not the reasons. Violence is violence whether racial slurs are used or not. We shouldn't be demeaning someone else's suffering by elevating another's.