Hate Crime Research Paper

Hate Crime in the United States is a growing epidemic. "Hate crime" generally means a crime against persons or property motivated in whole or in part by racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual orientation and other prejudices. Politicians, journalists, interest groups, and some criminologists insist that the United States is experiencing an across-the-board hate crime epidemic. Race, religion, and sexual orientation are three of the leading targets of hate crimes that improved since before but need further resolutions.

Hate crimes attempted due to race have always been an issue of great controversy since the conception of the the United States of America. Of the 7,624 hate crime incidents reported nationwide in 2007, the most recent year

The deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore are just a few examples that initiated violent riots around the country, having been at the hands of white police officers. Of course racial tensions, in these cases, would rise again due to the image of a black man being killed by a white police officer, although these tensions might have had diminished since the Civil Rights era (Cherry 2016). Cherry suggests that the motive behind hate crimes against black is all about white people feeling in control. In other words, the power of domination and exclusion is being white, otherwise they would “cease to exist for want of reason” whether this power is direct or insidious

“The FBI crime data documents seven types of anti religious hate crimes: anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-Protestant, anti-Islamic, anti-other religious group, anti-atheism/agnosticism/etc., and anti-multi-religions” (Cheng, Ikes & Kenworthy, 2013) and since the tragic events on 9/11 there has been a spike of Islamophobia. Clay suggests that this has had a psychological impact on muslim americans. Around 600 Arab-Americans were examined for anxiety and depression in 35 states. The majority of the participants in the study were muslims. It was then found that “Half the study participants had depression serious enough to warrant further assessment. A quarter reported moderate to severe anxiety. Those rates are higher than those of the general public and other minority groups, says Amer, citing ongoing racial profiling, discrimination and other stressors unique to Arabs as causes” (Clay 2011). And despite the Arab-Americans receiving death threats from strangers, Clay also reports, "I saw articles online where people were saying if they are depressed, that means they 're crazy and shouldn 't even be living in this country." However, muslims were not the only ones affected by Religious Hate Crimes. A study claims that “[t]he standardized residuals revealed that Jews were consistently more likely to become victims of religious hate crimes compared with other religious groups. Before 2001, every other religious