Kamala Harris has slipped to second place behind Bernie Sanders on Predictit’s Democratic nomination market. Sanders recently announced and raised some millions. He also led in a New Hampshire poll.
Yesterday Harris attacked those who use the term “identity politics”. She emphasized that “racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism are all real in this country.” Equally important, she said, is “how America deals with the issues and the disparities and also the hate that causes these issues to become lethal in proportion.”
These statements make us wonder: How important in the big picture of all crime are crimes of racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes and anti-Semites? All crimes, especially violent ones, need to be strongly suppressed, because of their large effects on the victims and the fear they inspire in non-victims. You cannot know how nerve-wracking and invasive a violent crime is until you’ve experienced it. Yet policing takes resources and government cannot act justly by focusing on lesser problems and ignoring larger ones.
Without question, Democrats and left-wingers, Harris among them, exaggerate certain categories of violent crimes, while ignoring others, in order to gain votes of sympathetic blocs. That’s one facet of identity politics. Hate crimes fall into a “made-up” category, and they are infrequent.
America experienced “332,198 robberies nationwide in 2016″. “In 2016, an estimated 1,248,185 violent crimes occurred nationwide…” These are estimates.
“NCAVP’s 2014 hate violence report documents 1,359 incidents of anti-LGBTQ violence in 2014, a significant 32% decrease from the 2,001 total incidents reported in 2013.”
More recently, some crimes are now classified as “hate crimes”. This is a growth category, meaning it can only show increases as reporting and emphasis on it increase. It is a political tool that never should have been adopted, but it’s now there. “In 2017, 7,175 hate crime incidents were reported”.
The 7,175 number is dwarfed by the 1.25 million violent crimes nationwide. Within this 7,175 number, 60 percent were crimes against the person. The FBI further breaks 7,106 single-bias incidents hate crimes down by identity of victim: race/ethnicity/ancestry (4,130), religious (1,564), sexual orientation (1,131), gender-identity (121), disability (114) and gender (46).
Some groups may in fact experience murders out of proportion to their frequency in the general population, for causes that are complex to analyze. As bad as this is, so are other violent crimes. “Hate” crimes are actually infrequent compared to other crimes. They’re not a big problem compared to other problems. The emphasis on them by a candidate like Kamala Harris and other Democrats is explained by the exploitation of sympathetic emotions to gain political advantage. It’s explained by the identity politics that she’s exploiting while denying that the term applies to her politics.
9:11 am on February 25, 2019
