Is Zimmerman White because a "Hate Crime" form doesn't list Hispanic as one of the options? (PDF)

I don't know if George Zimmerman is guilty or not. I wasn't there. That's not what this post is about.

I had already noticed that Zimmerman was always referred to as White but every picture I had seen of him looked Hispanic. I assumed that this the old "White on Black crime fits the narrative" trick of the media we've all grown used to. But it was brought to my attention that there may be an insidious official aspect to this matter that no one has mentioned.

Look at this PDF file. Notice that it's located on http://www2.fbi.gov. That's as real as it gets. Look at page 122 and 123. It shows copies of the Hate Crime Incident Report (Form 1-699). Compare the middle section titled "Bias Motivation" with the bottom section titled "Race of Offender(s) as an individual or group". Notice anything that appears in the middle section but not in the bottom section?

Hispanic is not one of the available options for "Race of Offender." Nor is Other. Any police department using this form would be likely to report George Zimmerman as being White if he were the offender but Hispanic if he were the victim. This would seem to me to skew the data collected away from Hispanics. And this is an official form located on an FBI server. (Yes, I know it's from 2004. No, I have no idea if it has been revised. I do know that it's the very first hit if you Google "UCR handbook online.")

This isn’t what you were looking for, but it is kind of interesting.

Race and the Application of the Death Penalty

http://www.capitalpunishmentincontext.org/issues/race

Questions of whether or not the death penalty was applied fairly along racial lines surfaced in McCleskey v. Kemp. McCleskey argued that there was racial discrimination in the application of Georgia’s death penalty. As evidence for this claim, McCleskey presented the results of an extensive statistical study by Professor David Baldus of the University of Iowa Law Schooland his colleagues. Baldus’ study collected information about all the capital defendants in Georgia—whether or not they were sentenced to death. This information allowed the researchers to control for hundreds of variables about the offender, victim and crime—thereby permitting a statistical comparison of cases in order to see what factors influenced whether a person was sentenced to death. Professor Baldus found, among other things, that:

Fewer than 40% of Georgia homicide cases involve white victims, but in 87% of the cases in which a death sentence is imposed the victim is white. White-victim cases are roughly eleven times more likely than black-victim cases to result in a sentence of death.

When the race of the defendant is added to the analysis, the following pattern appears: 22% of black defendants who kill white victims are sentenced to death; 8% of white defendants who kill white victims are sentenced to death; 1% of black defendants who kill black victims are sentenced to death; and 3% of white defendants who kill black victims are sentenced to death. (Only 64 of the approximately 2500 homicide cases studied involved killings of blacks by whites, so the 3% figure in this category represents a total of two death sentences over a six-year period. Thus, the reason why a bias against black defendants is not even more apparent is that most black defendants have killed black victims; almost no cases are found of white defendants who have killed black victims; and virtually no defendant convicted of killing a black victim gets the death penalty.)

No factor other than race explains these racial patterns. The multiple-regression analysis with the greatest explanatory power shows that after controlling for non-racial factors, murderers of white victims receive a death sentence 4.3 times more frequently than murderers of black victims. The race of the victim proves to be as good a predictor of a capital sentence as the aggravating circumstances spelled out in the Georgia statute, such as whether the defendant has a prior murder conviction or was the primary actor in the present murder.

Only 5% of Georgia killings result in a death sentence; yet, when more than 230 non-racial variables are controlled for, the death-sentencing rate is 6% higher in white-victim cases than in black-victim cases. A murderer therefore incurs less risk of death by committing the murder in the first place than by selecting a white victim instead of a black one.

The effects of race are not uniform across the spectrum of homicide cases. In the least aggravated cases, almost no defendants are sentenced to death; in the most aggravated cases, a high percentage of defendants are sentenced to death regardless of their race or their victim’s; it is in the mid-range of cases which, as it happens, includes cases like McCleskey’s that race has its greatest influence. In these mid-range cases, death sentences are imposed on 34% of the killers of white victims and 14% of the killers of black victims. In other words, twenty out of every thirty-four defendants sentenced to die for killing a white victim would not have received a death sentence if their victims had been black.

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