In the comments to John Rosenberg's post on the Claremont fake hate crime, Gabriel Rossman asks an important question:

In my selective perception it seems that with the exception of fraternity "ghetto" parties and other acts of hate speech that are grossly insensitive but harm nobody's physical person nor property, a very high proportion of contemporary campus racial incidents are fake. So my question is, does anyone know of any verified hate crimes involving physical violence or vandalism on a campus? Does anyone know the ratio of fake to true serious campus hate crime accusations? How many convictions have been made in the last 5 or 10 years for this sort of thing? These aren't rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely curious since faking a crime to create sympathy for a political cause is rather bizarre behavior, though obviously not without historical precedent (eg. the Reichstag fire).

It's a good question. Anybody know a way to answer it? I'd be extremely wary of guessing about the answer, at any rate, in either direction.

How are these "ghetto parties" offensive to any particular group? There are plenty of different ethnic groups living in the ghetto and these ghetto themed parties don't intend to hurt anyone of lower socio economic status, but rather embrace qualities of the ghetto culture/lifestyle.

People looking for stats can go to the websites of ADL and the Department of Education.

ADL has detailed (and well-verified) hate crimes audits. The most recent audit (from 2002) claims there were 104 anti-Semitic incidents on U.S. campuses in 2002, an increase of 24 percent from 2001.

Http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASUS_12/4243_12.asp

The department of Education has a fairly recent survey:

http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/crime/hatecrimes/index.html

Note that they list 13 hate-related murders in 2001!

Also interesting is the fact that the numbers seem to decline from 2001 to 2002.

Amardeep

Slightly OT, but if the Claremont Police reports are valid, the professor lied not only to the police, but also to the FBI. That is, FEDERAL INVESTIGATORS. Isn't Martha Stewart facing up to 20 years in the slammer for LYING TO FEDERAL INVESTIGATORS? Any bets on how many years the professor will serve? Or if she is even charged?

Bruce, Volokh Conspiracy analyzed a while ago that Martha Stewart faces at most a couple years, and here's a Reuters article which reports anywhere from 10 months to two years as her probable sentence under federal guidelines.

Timothy Burke writes, "It's a good question. Anybody know a way to answer it?"

How about a search of Lexis-Nexis? Terms like "college hate crime," for example, might turn up some useful comparative data.

Re Gabrielís question about actual hate crimes that go beyond the distasteful black face incidents etc., letís not forget the hate crimes that university and town officials refuse to classify as hate crimes. A series of examples occurred at the University of Virginia well before the more notorious Daisy Lundy affair. See my discussion here, in my first Daisy post. (Disclaimer: like Erin, I have serious doubts about the whole ìhate crimeî enterprise.)

Bruce, I had added a reference to Martha's conviction to my post that Erin cited.

Is an fake hate crime a hate crime?

Perhaps the Justice Dept. could begin to keep track of fake hate crimes (a fake hate crime index) and minority on majority hate crimes. Why limit it to colleges and universities though. Perhaps the most recent heinous example of minority on majority hate crimes was the execution of four white young adults by two black killers in Wichita, Kansas two years ago. There was very little media space devoted to this crime (just another murder folks, keep moving!). It would be interesting if we could start calling thing as they really are.

The justice department has excellent hate crime statistics, which for both campuses and elsewhere track every possible permutation of offender and victim. If you have a copy of SPSS, access to ICPSR, and a fast connection, you can download a copy of the DOJ data and cut it anyway you like. Unfortunately these statistics don't track hoaxes so we can't see what proportion those are.

Over on John's copy of this thread, Nel Nelson posted this address to the FBI's hate crime report. http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hatecrime2002.pdf
My concern with this data is that a large proportion of the incidents are "intimidation." I don't know the legal definition of intimidation, but my suspicion is that this category may include both terroristic threats (which are justly illegal) and hate speech (which is constitutionally protected). Laying aside that concern, the FBI data shows 789 campus hate crimes in 2002, half of which were about race.

Combined with the resources that Amardeep was nice enough to post, this gives us a pretty good picture of the denominator (500-800 campus hate crimes in 2002). I can only recall hearing of about 3 or 4 hoaxes a year. I would appreciate a more accurate picture of the numerator if anyone can provide it, but for now, let's just assume that because I don't hear about every revealed hoax and not every hoax is revealed that the true number of hoaxes is four times the number I hear about, so there are twelve to sixteen hoaxes a year. This would mean that hoaxes are, at most, 3% of all campus hate crime reports, and probably less, though they may be a higher proportion of some specific category of reported campus hate crimes.

I can think of several reasons why I thought this proportion might be higher:
1) A typical crime victim, perhaps even more so for a typical bias crime victim, is traumatized by the incident and even if he reports the crime he does not want to draw further attention to it. In contrast a pseudo-victim by definition seeks to attract publicity to an incident.
2) The man bites dog element of a faked crime makes it both more newsworthy and more memorable.
3) My personal optimism about the civility and order of college campuses and cynicism about the tactics of left-wing campus activists.

My wife's the head of PR at a small liberal arts college with a large hispanic population.

They get about 1 fake hate crime a year. Since she's been there (6 years) there have been no real hate crimes that involve the campus. There have been a couple in the community that may have involved race as a motive - but they were hispanics attacking whites, so they weren't classified as hate crimes by the police.

The amazing thing is that all the hate crimes reported on campus have been proven to be fake. You'd think some would get through - that there wouldn't be enough evidence to show they were fake, and they'd be accepted as real even when they weren't

I believe that Laird Wilcox has collected information on fake hate crimes for a number of years. From what I recall of his writings, he argues that the proportion of fake hate crimes is substantial--and that there are sound logical reasons in terms of incentives and psychology to expect that result.

I think you need to be careful in your estimates.

If I have 100 alleged crimes, of which I know 5 are fake, I really don't anything about the other 95.

What you need is the ratio of known fakes to known real crimes to make an estimate of the whole population (a shaky estimate).

From what i've heard, the claimed racial incidents against disadvantaged minorities have all been false alarms in the sense that no conviction for physical injury at the hands of a caucasian student has occrred in some decades here.tawana brawley and sharpton may show the pattern. there could be competition for enhancement of certified victim status, an objective of little value outside academia. yet in the larger society, interracial violence is up on the order of 100-fold, or so i've been told, over the last 40 years. increasing diversity was supposed to have the opposite effect.diversity the anti-merit people, on the web, argues that pro-diversity really aims to foment racial violence as a means for officials to declare a national emergency and establish dictatorship with no opposition (except from those who the gov't then would describe as racist or uncaring about the victims of racial violence)

I discuss what appears to be a real hate crime (though apparently not prosecuted as such) here.

the next older post gives an example of a likely bias incident of the sort that legislation and policy would seem particularly aimed at, resembling , say, caste violence in india. hopefully, it did not involve an on-campus location or a victim who was not trying to join a fraternity that practices hazing. there is still, perhaps, needed an example of demonstrated aggression involving determinate physical injury by white students or faculty on a university campus against a disadvantaged minority student in recent years, and one which likely targeted the victim for racial reasons. if there haven't been any such incidents, the hoaxing could be much worse than is guessed.

Many good comments here.

Steve Sailor wrote at length about this incident as a hate crime against white hetero men. I don't often agree with Mr. Sailor, and his language is often fiery for effect, but in this case I've got to agree. The intent of this hoax was to promote hatred and suspicion against the certified villian, white hetero men.

We spent a lot of time and energy trying to understand and redress the damage of systematic racism and sexism. We understood that such attacks, particularly when endorsed by public institutions, can cause great psychic harm to individuals, particularly to those who are weak or gifted with less intelligence.

This battering has been destroying white hetero men who are not strong enough to withstand the emotional and psychic attack. I often get very angry at these men, but, then, I have been strong enough to withstand the assault, and I have a sympathetic wife who fights back. For those who are not so fortunate, an ugly syndrome is emerging. I often talk with white hetero men who are struggling to stay afloat in the sea of hatred. They adopt the hatred and become espousers of it, engaging in a vile sort of competition to be the most self-abnegating, self-hating white hetero man on earth.

I know that it is fashionable to not care about these men. They are often sensitive and inteligent men, but they are bereft, for one reason or another, of the strength to fight back.

Somebody is being damaged by this outpouring of hatred against hetero white men. We have little sympathy for such men, because we believe it is their responsibility to buck it up, grin and bear it. The weak among us are being destroyed by this, and I think it is time to take a look at them. They are men who often make very little money, and they have no social position. In short, they are precisely the men we like to imagine are the perps in the racism, sexism, homophobia litany. Nobody wants to hear or see them.

I did a quick Lexis-Nexis search to see what would come up. And the answer is, a lot. Below is a sampling of some media coverage of some real campus hate crimes against Jews and people of color from the past six-eight months. The first two are violent incidents, the rest are scenes of intimidation.

1. Here is a particularly nasty hate crime against an Indian grad student at the University of Massachusetts last year. Saurabh Bhalerao received multiple stab wounds and cigarette burns on his face...

http://www.rediff.com/us/2003/jul/04ajp.htm

The incident was widely covered in the mass media.

2. November 19, 2003 Baltimore Sun. Another incident occurred with students from McDaniel College.

"Although campus safety officers arrived first on the scene, Barnes said Westminster police responded and found victim Stuart Johnson, 19. He was taken to Carroll Hospital Center, where he was treated for a head injury that required stitches, Barnes said. Police found broken glass at the scene but were unable to determine whether it was used in the assault. Johnson is recuperating at his home in Baltimore County, Barnes said. He added that another student suffered minor injuries. Both victims are African-American, he said."

3. October 31 2003. Capital Times (Madison, WI). 3 Skinheads broke into a largely non-white married student housing complex, kicked down several doors, and made intimidating racial comments.

4. February 7, 2004, Tampa Tribune. University of South Florida students reported a noose on the tree outside of their dorm.

5. March 15, 2004, Detroit Free Press. An Eastern Michigan University student says a man in a KKK uniform was harassing her in her room.

6. Octobre 24, 2003. Providence Journal-Bulletin. A Jewish student found a swastika on the door of her dormitory.

for amardeep's 2 leading examples of white-student racial violence against disadvantaged minorities: the first is far off-campus, the victim is a student, but the arrestees are not... the second is described as a brawl that started on a chartered bus that was returning from a nightclub, and cont'd on to the campus, with no indication as to who is the aggressor. these will not likely turn out to be hoaxes, yet they are not clear cases of majority aggression and racial violence by students against others on university grounds, as we are supposed to imagine is not unheard of. Even if such events were common , it would not imply that caucasians are genetically coded ( or otherwise fated ) to prevent other groups from rising. Is this what we are asked to believe ; that sufficient number of minorities is needed to escape this fated or inborn baneful influence?

s

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