Gender hate by the numbers

Back in 2009, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act expanded victimization to include gender and gender-identity bias, and required the FBI to track statistics on those categories.

The 2013 edition of the FBI Hate Crime Statistics report is the first to include gender-related incidents, and the numbers are a little underwhelming for all the hoopla that surrounded the law's passage.

With more than 15,000 agencies reporting, covering a population of more than 295 million over a 365-day period, there were exactly 63 total gender and gender-identity hate-crime incidents.

That barely averages one per state for the whole year, and there were zero such incidents reported in Arkansas.

In its Uniform Crime Reports, the FBI typically converts whole numbers to an index of incident per 100,000 population to demonstrate a rate or frequency of crime.

For example, the violent crime index for the U.S. in 2013 was 367.9--derived by allocating 1.16 million violent crimes across the population of 316 million people.

But with only 5,922 single-bias hate-crime incidents in 2013, allocated over the nation's population, the total hate-crime index comes out pretty paltry: 2.

If we narrow the incidents to only include violent hate crimes, the national index falls precipitously to 0.3. Arkansas' rate (0.25) is slightly better, and wouldn't have been that high had our state not reported one of only five hate-crime murders in 2013.

Reporting hate-crime index figures that are more than 1,200 times less than violent-crime rates--in Arkansas, they're 1,782 times less--might provoke some difficult questions, and some equally uncomfortable answers.

Why is Arkansas' violent-crime rate for 2013 higher than the national rate by 21 percent, for example? And what is being done to try and bring it back into line?

There's been a recent spate of attempts in various Arkansas municipalities to expand civil-rights ordinances to include gender identity.

But if the FBI's numbers indicate anything, it's that not only are hate crimes exceedingly rare in Arkansas, but nonexistent based on gender identity.

There were only 33 such crimes--and only 11 violent hate crimes against transgendered persons--in the whole country.

In other words, for all the cumulative legal, legislative, public relations, media campaign and other resources expended on the gender-identity issue, the best outcome possible in 2013 would have affected only 33 Americans.

On any other issue, massive nationwide lobbying for legislation to benefit 0.00000011 percent of the population would be considered absurd.

That's not because those 33 people aren't important, but because legislative effort is finite, and misfocused energy on a tiny few results in loss of focus on so many millions more.

When the city of Jonesboro was pressed by some to enact an anti-discrimination ordinance specifically covering gender identity, Mayor Harold Perrin said his administration didn't feel it necessary. There are already anti-discrimination laws in place and Jonesboro complies with all of them, he rightly said.

Prior to lobbying for civil-rights ordinances, proponents should first demonstrate evidence of a need. How many people have been discriminated against in Jonesboro by the city on the basis of gender identity? None that I know of.

It's not good lawmaking to act against what isn't happening, but might, instead of acting against what is happening.

Thanks to the FBI's exhaustive report, we know just how amazingly few times a hate crime is committed against that portion of the population.

One of the least reported aspects of the FBI's analysis is the steep decline in hate crimes over the past decade. Overall, with more agencies than ever reporting incidents, hate crimes are down 21 percent since 2003. Broken down, the number of hate-crime murders fell by 64 percent, aggravated assaults by 20 percent, intimidation by 30 percent and destruction/damage/vandalism by 32 percent.

Arkansas' numbers are even better. In 2003, with 128 law enforcement agencies participating, covering only 1.1 million population, we reported 170 incidents.

Our 2013 figures show 265 agencies participating with a covered population of 2.8 million, but only 27 incidents--a staggering 84 percent reduction in whole numbers. The rate reduction, taking into account the greater population coverage from additional reporting, is an astounding 1,600 percent.

That's good news worth celebrating, even though it only affects a literal handful of people.

The bad news that deserves more reporting--and more legislative deliberation--is that the number of Arkansas violent crimes is up 6 percent since 2003. The national trend went the other direction: down 16 percent.

Specifically, Arkansas rapes and robberies and aggravated assaults increased by 9, 1 and 7 percent respectively. The U.S. decreases in the same categories were 15 percent, 17 percent and 16 percent.

Context is critical when assessing government priorities and applying the weight and force of law and criminalization.

Arkansas clearly has one of the smaller hate-crime problems in the nation (fewer than 37 other states, and only 0.4 percent of total U.S. offenses), and a much more pressing and harmful violent-crime problem.

It's a shame we don't have more activist-minded citizens devoting energy in that direction.

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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.

Editorial on 05/29/2015

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