re: #8 wrenchwench

It would seem you are comparing anecdotes compiled by some blogger with no good window on aggregate statistics, with aggregate reports from an official agency.

To compare apples to apples, you’d need to choose your milieu, and investigate. One could choose the entire universe of reported hate crimes, for which the DoJ link you cite might be a good proxy. But then, one would have to actually examine which of those turned out to be hoaxes and which did not. Further, one would have to look at all the crimes that didn’t make the DoJ’s list for one reason or another. Which points up the ridiculous nature of hate crime laws: they are essentially a thought-crime enhancement to an actual crime, and they are enforced quite unevenly.

An easier task would be to focus on the anecdotes: look at all the ones that got significant news coverage, and see how many of them were hoaxes. This of course has its own problems, because there is bias in what makes them newsworthy. For example, I would argue that Mona Nelson’s crime (theconservativetreehouse.com) should have been newsworthy, but it got far less coverage than the Lunenberg High hoax, which wasn’t a capital crime but simple vandalism.

Perhaps the most objective metric is one I can’t find: how many times did the FBI send its elite “hate crimes unit” to investigate? and of those times, how many were found to be either “not a hate crime,” (like Matthew Shepard’s gruesome murder, which turned out to have been a drug-related event and the perp may have been bisexual) or an out-and-out lie, like Sharmeka Moffitt. That would be a meaningful metric, but it probably won’t be revealed to the public. The reasons for that, we are left to speculate.