The Squishy Secrets of Hard Hate-Crime Stats

Real Clear Investigations ^ | August 18, 2017 | James Varney

[2ndDivisionVet]

On a clear February day in 2010, Andrew Joseph Stack III pushed his single-engine airplane to its top speed and flew it into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, killing himself and a manager of the federal tax collecting agency.

Stack’s suicide mission was clearly an act of extremist terror, but which kind? Was it right-wing because he attacked a government office? Or was it left-wing because the writing he left behind favorably compared communism to capitalism and railed against the bailout of financial institutions in 2008?

Those seemingly arcane and morbid questions have taken on new urgency since President Trump blamed forces “on many sides” for the violence in Charlottesville, Va. Various news outlets have sought to answer those questions by referring to statistics about the exact number of fatalities caused by “right-wing,” “left-wing” or “Islamic” extremists.

But a closer look reveals that those precise figures involve art as well as science, often requiring judgment calls that lead organizations to come up with very different answers to the same question.

“All of this is inherently fairly subjective at some level,” said Alex Nowrasteh, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute, “because it depends on what people say, or what they sometimes claim as motivation after the fact.”

The New York Times, for example, ran two stories Tuesday that used very different studies to measure the same thing: extremist violence in the United States. One story cited a study by the Anti-Defamation League that counted at least 372 murders committed by “domestic extremists” between 2007 and 2016.

The second Times story referred to Nowrasteh’s analysis for Cato that counted almost two-thirds fewer deaths: 134 murders during that same 10-year period.

The numbers differ because the studies count different things....

[Impala64ssa]

Other than John Wilkes Booth, and John Hinkley, who according to investigators had nazi AND commie propaganda cluttering his apartment and who turned ot to be a effed up nutbag obsessed with a slutty actress who turned out gay, every Pres who was assassinated or had an attempt on their lives, the perpetrators turned out to be extreme LEFTISTS.

[MileHi]

You’ll be hard pressed to get the straight scoop on any of these nut jobs, most all of whom are either leftist or mentally ill. (Did I just repeat myself?)

[Cubs Fan]

I remember in the local paper a couple years ago, a white kid got beat up by some black kids. They called him doughboy and white boy. the judge ruled it was not a hate crime because those weren't racial epithets. seriously

Never trust leftists to do anything honest. They cheat at everything. I am more than certain the stats are rigged to help them come out the way they want. just like global warming data.

[tbw2]

The literal fake hate crimes list
http://fakehatecrimes.org/