Hate Crimes in California 2019

Hat tip Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers


The State of California, headed by the Office of the California Attorney General, has issued its report on hate crimes for 2019. They are broken down by category as to which groups are victimized.



https://proisraelbaybloggers.blogspot.com/2020/07/anti-semitic-incidents-up-12-in.html




It appears from the various charts that in 2019, a total of 1,015 cases were reported involving 1,247 victims and 967 suspects. Of that, 392 cases were referred for prosecution, and 288 cases were actually filed.  Of that, 200 cases were filed as hate crimes and 88 as other offenses, non-bias. As of the issuing of the report, 166 cases have dispositions- 82 hate crime convictions, 74 convictions for other offenses, non-bias, and 10 not convicted.

I generally take these kinds of statistics with a grain of salt for many reasons. They can be influenced by political and sociological considerations. In addition, the people compiling the statistics are able to categorize crimes as they wish. For example, if you don't want to call it a hate crime, you can attribute the incident to some other cause. For example, if a group of men-or women for that matter- from one ethnicity attacks and beats up someone of another ethnicity, is it a hate crime, especially if no racial epithets are thrown out in the course of the incident?  If such epithets are used, the classification should be clear. But if no such epithets are used, is it up to the discretion of those compiling the statistics? To be fair, this report takes the reported incidents and then breaks them down as to prosecutorial follow up. In the case of criminal prosecution involving beatings or other violence, prosecutors often will first ask if there was any statement or expression of hate toward the victim's ethnic group. If not, they might simply prosecute the act of violence or crime. There are other factors that go into that decision, of course.

I also note here that hate crimes against blacks are much more numerous than hate crimes against whites according to this study and most studies that track hate crimes. Yet, it is a fact that black on white crime is much higher than white on black crime in recent years. I say in recent years because there was a time in our history that blacks truly lived in fear of mob white violence-at least in the South. I don't have any empirical evidence, but I have always suspected that the white-black numbers are often governed by political correctness.

One thing that should not be forgotten, especially if you consider the gang situation in Los Angeles and in California state prisons, is that in the last several years, there has been been a lot of violence between the Mexican gangs and African-American gangs. Could it be that accounts for much of the statistics concerning those groups?  Just asking?

That leads me to an important point: It appears there is no information or breakdown as to who the perpetrators are. There are a lot of charts in this report, but I didn't see any reference to the ethnicity of the perpetrators. We know who the victims are, but we don't know who the perpetrators are.

Another area of concern is the number of hate crimes committed against Jews, and for that matter, against Arab-Americans and/or Muslims. As in the national statistics compiled annually by the FBI in recent years, Jews are victimized much more often that are Arabs and/or Muslims. This presents to me a dilemma: Am I to accept the latter comparisons while questioning the accuracy of the former? A fair point.

As I interpret the report, 200 cases were filed for prosecution in 2019 with 82 hate crime convictions with 34 cases still pending. What does that tell us? Granted, one case is one too many, but it is very hard to interpret these statistics-especially when there is no breakdown as to perpetrators.