What is Hate?

Twenty-nine-year-old Michael Sandy headed for Plumb Beach one day last October for what he thought was a date along a wooded stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens shoreline (yes, woods in New York). He had hooked up with the guy on the internet, but instead of a walk on the wild side, he was mugged by four men, ran onto the Belt Parkway to get away and was killed by a passing automobile.

Police tracked down the perps, and they were charged with murder as a hate crime, which increases the potential jail terms in case of a conviction. Prosecutors argued that Sandy had been targeted for being gay, a category covered in New York’s hate crime statute. The attackers knew they could prey upon Sandy in a specific way—get him to come to the park alone—and that he might well cover up the crime instead of facing wisecracking police at the station house. The fact that Sandy was black added to the complexity despite or because of the fact that prosecutors never argued that the muggers were racists.

The trial was an extraordinary opportunity to see how the hate-crime phenomenon plays out, and there were surprises as well: one of the defendants said HE was gay too, and brought in ex-lovers as witnesses. So, he argued, whatever crime he committed, it wasn’t based on hate.

In the first case to go to trial, the jurors took their time figuring out what to do with all that, and they came back with a measured decision. They reduced the charge to manslaughter, but affirmed the hate-crime aspect, endorsing the idea that the point was not the defendant’s private sentiments but the act of targeting an individual for what he is.

That strikes me as a new wrinkle in the debate about hate crimes, and it’s worth considering now that nooses are appearing in doorways all over the New York area lately, probably an after-effect of the attention paid to the racist incidents in Jena, Louisiana. Al Sharpton is clamoring for the law to be expanded and toughened, and the situation is troubling enough that the idea deserves a hearing.

It also brings up two other situations to my mind: all the undocumented Hispanic workers being mugged by knowing teenagers, such as the rash of incidents reported in the Washington Post Friday, anecdotes I hear repeated all over the South where I travel for work. Since the Mexican and Central American workers aren’t likely to go the police and can’t get a bank account to deposit their earnings, they’re easily victimized by young thugs. According to the Michael Sandy standard, those are hate crimes and should be prosecuted accordingly. I wonder what Sharpton would have to say about that.

Finally, you can’t live in New York these days without seeing frequent news items about young African-American males shot down by city police officers, on and off duty, under highly suspicious circumstances. Oftentimes, the officers themselves are African-American too, but the effects are pretty much the same: dead, unarmed black men who were minding their own business. Using the Sandy standard, these incidents are arguably hate crimes, given that the perpetrators apparently think the victims are easily targeted as a class.

In any case, something needs to be done to stop this epidemic of official violence, and it would be a strong signal if a hate charge were slapped on one of these trigger-happy cops.