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The meaning and enforcement of the Illinois hate-crimes statute
seems destined for intense scrutiny with the arrest this week of
four young black adults in Chicago in connection with the assault of
a mentally disabled white man. The arrests by the Chicago Police
Department resulted in part from what appeared to a livestreamed
video of the disabled man being abused while bound and gagged. The
recording captures one or more of the attackers making references to
Donald Trump and white people.

The Illinois hate-crime statute reads as follows:

A person commits hate crime when, by reason of the actual or
perceived race, color, creed, religion, ancestry, gender, sexual
orientation, physical or mental disability, or national origin of
another individual or group of individuals, regardless of the
existence of any other motivating factor or factors, he commits
assault, battery, aggravated assault, misdemeanor theft, criminal
trespass to residence, misdemeanor criminal damage to property,
criminal trespass to vehicle, criminal trespass to real property,
mob action, disorderly conduct, harassment by telephone, or
harassment through electronic communications.

On Wednesday, Commander Kevin Duffin said the department was
weighing whether to bring hate-crime charges against the suspects,
saying it was not yet clear whether the attack was motivated by
bias, according to The Washington Post.

“They’re young adults. And they make stupid decisions,” Duffin was
quoted saying in the Post account. “That certainly will be part of
whether or not we seek a hate crime to determine whether this is
sincere or just stupid ranting and raving.”

On Thursday, however, CNN reported that formal hate-crime charges
had indeed been filed. The arrests, as well as the police’s inquiry
into the circumstances of the alleged attack, set off a perhaps not
surprising firestorm on social media. The police were blasted for
their failure to immediately charge the accused with hate crimes.
The media were criticized for supposedly failing to adequately cover
the incident.

The issue of hate crimes being committed against white people has
flared occasionally over the years, and last year the website
Broadly explored it in a post. It noted that a black Wisconsin
teen’s conviction for assaulting a 14-year-old white boy under a
hate-crimes statute had ultimately been upheld by the U.S. Supreme
Court, and endorsed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The black
teen had allegedly said “Do you feel all hyped up to move on some
white people” after watching the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

James Jacobs, a professor of constitutional law at New York
University and the courts director for the Center for Research in
Crime and Justice, told Broadly, “There’s nothing unusual about
applying hate crime laws to black defendants who harbor racist
motivations against their victims.”

ProPublica reported late last year on recent hate crimes in New York
City. According to data kept by the New York Police Department,
there had been 380 hate crimes reported in 2016. Crimes against
Muslims were up 50 percent from the same time last year. Crimes
involving sexual orientation were also up.

But whites had been victims, too — the source of 16 reported crimes,
nearly double the number of the year prior and most involving acts
of violence.

The subject of hate crimes — how they are defined, how they are
enforced, how they are reported by the media — has only intensified
since the presidential election. Many critics of Trump’s campaign
warned that his racially inflammatory policy positions and rhetoric
would inspire violence against minorities and immigrants. Trump, for
his part, has said that was not his intent. But his supporters have occasionally seized on reports of hate crimes, questioning their
prevalence and veracity. The false report made by a Muslim girl in
New York City was one such example.

Hate-crime data is poorly collected across the country, something
ProPublica hopes to help remedy in 2017 with a yearlong project
aimed at documenting and verifying bias incidents. The FBI counts
between 5,000 and 10,000 hate crimes annually, though surveys by the
federal Bureau of Justice indicate that there may be as many as
250,000. While the FBI’s data is incomplete, anti-white crimes make
up about 20 percent of recorded hate crimes annually.

Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and
Extremism at California State University, said that while anti-white
hate crimes make up a disproportionately small number of hate crimes
given the white population, they are still given too little focus. “[Anti-white crime] exists, and when it happens it does not get the
same kind of moral outrage that it should,” he said. But Levin said
this crime should not raise questions about “one group being bad and
another group being good,” but should push society to face a larger
problem of coarseness throughout the country.

“The more that Americans feel unmoored from the institutions and
creed that holds us together, the more often this kind of crap is
going to happen on all sides of the spectrum,” he said, adding that
minority groups that have traditionally been targeted will also act
out because of this in ways that shouldn’t be ignored. “The idea
that a group that has faced discrimination — African Americans, Jews
— is somehow inoculated against having the effects of an
increasingly coarse society affect their members is an illusion.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy organization that has
long monitored hate crimes and bias incidents, has long recorded
attacks against whites, and has pledged to do so going forward,
including those crimes against whites possibly inspired by Trump’s
victory. So far the SPLC has recorded 23 anti-Trump incidents,
though it acknowledges this may be an undercount given who is most
likely to report incidents of bias to the SPLC.

Richard Cohen, president of the SPLC, declared the alleged Chicago
assault a hate crime. “Whether this is a hate crime based on
disability or a hate crime based on race, I think it is incumbent on
the authorities to act swiftly,” he said, calling the crime
“incredibly shocking.”

“The anti-white and anti-Trump remarks came one after the other,”
Cohen said of the recording. “I take it as a synonym for anti-white
rhetoric in their minds.”

The authorities, with the filing of charges Thursday, appeared for
the moment to agree.

https://www.propublica.org/article/alleged-chicago-assault- reignites-issue-of-hate-crimes-against-whites

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