Phillip Atiba GoffGeverifieerd account

2. First of all, this number is a severe undercounting. National surveys routinely show that actual hate crimes are nearly TWENTY TIMES higher than UCR hate crimes stats.

3. While it’s hard to estimate exactly, this means there may well have been 5,000 more hate crimes in 2016 than 2015. That’s bad.

4. What’s worse, the amount of national attention given to these incidents in 2017 means that their influence is being nationalized. Here’s what I mean:

5. The reason hate crimes should be a thing is NOT because we want to legislate what’s in someone’s heart.

6. Though, for those who want to say “then we shouldn’t have hate crimes, because the government shouldn’t care why someone kills,” please go read the statutes on first v. second degree murder and manslaughter and have a seat.

7. Anyway, the reason we should care about hate crimes is because they cause excess harm to groups of people based on their protected class status.

8. If someone is killed because they are gay, gay folks understand that they may be less safe.

9. And there is a history to those kinds of targeted acts of violence that we should all care to correct.

10. One of the problems with the UCR hate come stats is that the dramatic undercount makes it harder for those effected to organize necessary responses to them.

11. This is in part because those most likely targeted for hate crimes are also those least likely to trust the police.

12. If we really cared about protecting those communities, we’d make it easier for them to report hate crimes.

13. ALSO, there is no measure of how broad the terror from a given incident spread. Again, if we cared, we’d measure it.

14. I say all of that because it is so often these little elements of keeping track that either arm us as a nation with the truth or keep us in the dark.