Hate to spoil crime ‘rise’, but it’s clickbait

There are vested interests that benefit from a perception of increasing racism and transphobia.

Kenny Altidor’s memorial to George Floyd is unveiled in Brooklyn, New York, in June. Picture: AFP

Turn on the television in the US and you would think America is the most racist, sexist, homophobic nation in the world. It turns out use of the words sexist, racist and homophobic has jumped about 500 per cent between 2010 and 2019, according to a study published last month that tracks the 47 most widely read and watched news outlets in the US since 1970.

The three authors, from the universities of Columbia and Otago, find “a sharp, substantial, and ubiquitous rise in the usage of words that denote prejudice”. In The New York Times, for instance, use of the words racist and sexist surged by 638 per cent and 403 per cent respectively

Has the US suddenly entered some de facto apartheid? “US hate crime is highest in more than a decade,” the BBC screamed in November, reporting on the latest (2019) annual hate crime statistics. It turns out hate crime is a minuscule proportion of crime and, if anything, has been in steep decline. The US experienced 7314 incidents of hate crime in 2019, up 2.7 per cent from the year before, while the number of offenders rose 2.2 per cent to 6406. The number of victims, though, fell slightly to 8812.

So, more people hated fewer people but a little more passionately than the year before. Does the volume or intensity of hate matter more than the consequences? Who knows in the bizarre world of hate crime hysteria?

Men were five times as likely to be murdered in the US in 2019, making up 80 per cent of the 15,000-odd homicides. But according to the hate crime statistics, women suffered 52 incidents, men only 17.

Overall, violent hate crimes didn’t even make up 0.5 per cent of the 1.2 million total number of violent crime incidents in 2019, barely a rounding error.

Moreover, hate crime has been falling. In 1996, the first year of online hate crime data, 8935 offenders committed 8760 hate crimes. In 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected president, 6921 offenders committed 7783 hate crimes. And in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected, 5727 offenders committed 6063. The downward trend is clear.

Moreover, the US population has increased by about 60 million since 1996 and the likelihood of a given crime being officially motivated by hate – as opposed to, say, indifference or passion – must surely have increased. For example, the number of hate crimes “motivated by two or more biases”, if a crime were simultaneously transphobic and racist, for example, has shot up from a mere six in 1996 to a shocking 211 in 2019.

And no wonder given the range of things to be officially hated for has increased. The 1990 statistics didn’t include anti-transgender, anti-gender nonconforming and anti-mental disability. The number of races you can be hated for has doubled to eight since those naive times.

“Swelling Anti-Asian Violence: Who Is Being Attacked Where,” The New York Times screamed in April. Anti-Asian hate crime rose to 158 incidents in 2019 from 148 the year before, leaving 23 million Asian-Americans at greater risk of being killed by a lightning strike over the course of their lives than suffering an anti-Asian attack. They are twice as likely to be killed by a dog.

In February 2019 a black and gay actor, Jussie Smollett, was charged by Chicago police with fabricating his own hate crime. He had told police he was assaulted by Trump supporters for his race and sexuality. The case continues.

In March that year, three professors from the University of North Texas and Texas A&M claimed US counties that had hosted Trump rallies in 2016 had endured a 226 per cent increase in “hate-motivated incidents”. “This is among the first research to systematically show that Trump events are correlated with a significant rise in domestic hate,” they boasted in their paper.

Unfortunately for them, Hillary Clinton’s rallies induced an even greater increase in hate incidents, using the same methodology. “Politicians tend to hold political rallies near where large numbers of people live. And in places with more people, the raw number of crimes is generally mechanically higher,” other academics, including Australian Matthew Lilley, a PhD student at Harvard, pointed out in a separate study in September 2019.

Why discussion and accusations of prejudice have surged astronomically while actual incidents flatlined or probably even declined isn’t clear.

“Increasing prevalence of prejudice-denoting words in news media discourse is often substantially correlated with US public opinion survey data on growing perceptions of minorities’ mistreatment,” the authors of the new study point out.

Perhaps in a few years Americans have become much more aware of and concerned about prejudice, prompting news media to satisfy this curiosity. Alternatively, the media independently has whipped up a frenzy about prejudice without justification, creating the false impression among readers that it has increased. Why would it do that?

The loss of traditional advertising revenue streams has forced publishers and broadcasters to become far more attuned to what elicits clicks and subscriptions than in the past. Accusations of prejudice make for an easy story, especially when outside think tanks and quangos have popped up dedicated to finding examples of prejudice and writing reports about it. Researchers at outfits such as the Centre for Study of Hate and Extremism in California would be out of work were it not for hate and extremism.

Rather than discuss the remarkable decline in crime, hate and non-hate, since the 1990s, let alone earlier decades, it’s better to carp about what’s left, as if there ever will be zero in a world of almost eight billion people.

It’s not only business and personal self-interest. The focus of left-wing politics has shifted dramatically from economic inequality to identity politics: the more perceived hate crime, the greater the likely success of attempts to profit electorally from dividing people by race, sex and sexuality.