Saturday, December 03, 2005

ViL: disparate treatment of racist murders

There's a thoughtful article in The Times today about the different sentencing treatment of the racist murderers in the two near-identical racist murders. They include a factoid that of 22 officially classified (by the Home Office) racist murders in 2001-2004, 12/22 victims were white.
Assuming you have to be non-white to commit an officially classified racist murder of a white, here's some arithmetic:

The CIA World Factbook puts the non-white population (2001 census) at 8% of the UK population. Apparently members of 8% of the population carried out 54.5% of the officially classified racist murders in the UK 2001-2004. By my reckoning that means that non-whites per capita carried out 6.8 times* as many racist murders as whites. Of course "non-whites" is a very fuzzy category (eg according to the FBI's crime data east-Asians in America commit far less crimes of all sorts than do American whites), but it gives the lie to claims that it's mostly whites who carry out racist attacks.

*Edit: If any of the 10 racist murders of non-whites were by non-whites, which is highly likely (eg there were apparently two racist murders of blacks by Pakistanis and one racist murder of a Pakistani by blacks in the riots recently) then whites would have committed less than 10/22 of the murders and this number would be higher.

3 comments:

Vol Abroad said...

This is why I would just prefer stiff sentences for all types of murders, rather than worry about classifying if a murder was racist or not and impose a stiffer sentence for that.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I agree. Minimum 30 year sentence (in jail) for these murders would be a reasonable start.

jen said...

I agree that classifying stuff as "hate crimes" is misguided. Killing someone for a specific race-related reason is no better or worse than for any other reason. If the person still ends up dead, it's the same crime. (Though many places also dole out harsher penalties for cop killings, whereas I think the same logic applies.) I also don't understand "inciting racial hatred"? How is that defined? And is it worse than the crime of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater if the effect is the same?

Trying to legislate civility doesn't work. It just masks the problem.