Viewpoints is a SpokaneFāVS feature where our writers respond to a weekly question. Readers are invited to participate by posting in the comment section below.
Earlier this month a man broke into the Sikh Temple of Spokane and vandalized the property, causing upwards of $30,000 in damages. Police say the man was drunk, and when he entered the building, saw the imagery and assumed it was ISIS, which spurred the vandalism.
Some say it was a hate crime. Others say it was a drunken mistake. It prompts today’s Viewpoints question: What’s your definition of a hate crime?
Eric Blauer: A need for intervention
The recent vandalism at the Sikh Temple was presented as a hate crime by some and others said it wasn’t.
The FBI describes a hate crime as:
“A hate crime is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias. For the purposes of collecting statistics, the FBI has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” Hate itself is not a crime—and the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties.”
From the reports I read the perp was high on drugs, naked and vandalized the temple when he thought he was inside some ISIS building.
He was obviously delusional and in my mind the real focus of the crime is addiction more than hate. The temple vandalism reflects the huge toll our communities take from the destructive impact of addiction
The same week a woman was murdered with a screwdriver by a man high on meth. He thought she was a witch, killed her and left her naked body in the interstate.
There also been a number of reoccurring fires set at local churches, provoking the community to wonder if we are in the midst of some focused hate crimes.
Prejudice, racism and hate are real problems in our culture but we need to be careful that we don’t mistake the fruits from the roots or distract the needed attention and intervention from the more central issues.
John Hancock: The problem is ignorance
I’m not a student of the law, but here are my characteristics of a hate crime:
- Intentionally attention-drawing, with an expectation of eventual backing by others in the in-group.
- Intent to punish or teach a lesson to not just the victim, but his out-group.
- Motive to avenge past wrongs felt by the perpetrator’s group/
While researching my 2014 FAVS article “A brief, recent history of the swastika in Spokane,” I learned that in Spokane County, painting a swastika on the property of “a victim who is or whom the actor perceives to be of Jewish heritage” is considered by the Sheriff’s Office to be a “prima facie” hate crime. That is, it’s assumed to be a hate crime until or unless proven otherwise.
Following the recent incident of vandalism at the Sikh temple in Spokane, it became apparent that the vandal might be suffering from mental illness. Nonetheless, he admitted to vandalizing the Sikh temple, after entering it without knowing what it was, because he believed it to be a mosque affiliated with ISIS. Many of us, upon first hearing about the vandalism, assumed in a “prima facie” way that it must be a hate crime. Islamophobia is rampant in America today, and Sikhs are not infrequently mistaken for Muslims.
From the centuries-old insanity defense to more nuanced ideas about what it means to treat a mentally ill person as a criminal, our justice system has long attempted to factor in the mental state of a perpetrator. I made a comment on Facebook after the vandalism incident, the gist of which was that highly influential purveyors of Islamophobia, such as Donald Trump, should be held accountable, if only at the ballot box, for helping to instigate Islamophobic acts, particularly if the people who commit such acts were already unstable.
I’m not sure the label of “hate crime” fully fits a man who, according to the Spokesman, “broke into the [temple] through a side door because he was cold and hungry,” then attacked what he mistakenly thought was a mosque. Yes, he must receive a sentence for this obvious act of violence, and hopefully some form of mental health treatment will be made available to him as well. But was this a hate crime in the fullest sense of the term?
Arguably, anyone who would attack a Jew, Muslim, Sikh, LGBT person, person of color, or member of any other minority merely because of their race/creed/sexual orientation/etc. is mentally unstable. However, an act of violence by a diagnosably unwell person is different, in my mind, from a similar act committed by someone who may be hateful and ignorant and bigoted but not diagnosable. Bernie Sanders received criticism, rightly, for making a passing joke that described the Republican presidential candidates as mentally ill. We might be able to match Trump up with some of the (now outdated) clinical criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, but I doubt he qualifies for an all-out insanity defense.
Some hatemongers are more in control of their mental faculties than others. The armchair psychologist/political analyst in me is convinced that Trump knows exactly what he’s doing with his Islamophobic, and generally xenophobic, onstage rants. Figuratively speaking, he doesn’t stumble into arena after arena through a side door looking for food and warmth. He walks in the front door brandishing a baseball bat and starts swinging. Anyone who, with full intention, beats up a minority protester at a Trump rally because of that person’s minority status is committing a hate crime. The Sikh temple vandal? His seemingly unstable mind had been polluted by hate, but in his case it may be more complicated.
This particular crime is a bit muddled when it comes to motivation; I imagine that’s true of many more crimes than most of us are comfortable admitting. Clearly, the question of intent is immensely important, and the consensus above appears to be that the man in question was so intoxicated that his ability to form intent is in question. While the law isn’t likely to cive such a consideration much weight (intoxication is not a valid criminal defense, at least in this state), we as moral agents have a bit more freedom to consider it, and I think we should.
Another consensus point, and one with which I heartily disagree, is that we ought not consider it a “hate crime” because while the victims were Sikhs, the perpetrator *thought* he was attacking Muslims. I don’t think mistaken identity should disqualify this as a hate crime; to allow this would be the same as treating a violent attack on a cisgender woman motivated by the misperception that she was transgender as a simple assault. The intent was there, even if the victim was not who the perpetrator thought them to be.
As to a more general definition of a “hate crime,” I think it’s a little problematic. Crimes are individual acts, and (given the way we’ve structured our justice system) must be responded to individually. Bias/racism/hate, however, are cultural phenomena in which all members of the culture are in some way implicated. (If it helps, consider the much-discussed difference between “climate” and “weather.” Climate is a pattern that emerges when you consider all of the individual weather events over a longish period of time, and while it is by definition present in every single one of those events, the degree to which it is determinative of any one event can be tricky to identify. In this analogy, burning a cross on a Black family’s lawn or spraypainting a swastika on a kosher deli would be the Katrinas and the Sandys–individual events that cannot plausibly be denied as being driven by the more global phenomena–whereas other crimes, like this one, will have a more subtle etiology, like the displacement of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Native Americans.
I think that intent will be the cornerstone of any such definition, and I’m especially symapthetic to Mr. Hancock’s criteria of visibility and animus directed at the group of which the victim is perceived to be an exemplar, in addition to animus towards the individual themself. It’s probably not enough for a “legal” definition, but it’s definitely a good foundation for a moral one.
This: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/atlanta-gay-burn-crime_us_56ec1cf1e4b09bf44a9d10e0