re: #204 Jimmah

My thinking on this has changed over the years. I used to think, like a lot of people here do now, that a crime is a crime, and that whether it was motivated by hate or something else, like greed, shouldn’t come into it. But I’ve come to realise that a hate crime is a bigger crime. Hate crimes are those intended not just to harm an individual, but to intimidate or terrorise the group of people to whom they belong. They are acts of terrorism, and deserve more severe punishments than crimes that are directed solely at an individual.

plus these kinds of crimes are the kinds of crimes that induce retaliation from the group that was attacked, thus leading to more crime through continued back-and-forth retaliation.