Peter Schorsch
If you go by the headlines in some Florida newspapers, you’d think that there’s a wave of hate crimes being committed across the state.
“Hate crimes up 22 percent across Florida,” reads the headline from the Florida Times-Union.
“Hate crimes rise in Florida,” blares the Orlando Sentinel.
Indeed reported hate crimes increased 22.3 percent in 2012 over the prior year, according to a report released Tuesday by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office, but the universe of incidents is so small, especially in a state as populous and as racially diverse as Florida, that there is no cause for alarm.
There were just 170 hate crimes reported in 2012 by local law enforcement agencies providing data to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. That’s right, just 170. In a state of 19.5 million people.
For the record, crimes motivated by race and skin color represented 54.1 percent of the reported cases. Other factors were: sexual orientation, which accounted for 28.8 percent; religion, 10 percent; ethnicity and national origin, 6.5 percent; and mental disability, 0.6 percent. The data does not include hate crimes committed against the homeless, which is not part of the Uniform Crime Reporting system used to compile the report.
Hate crimes were reported in 30 Florida counties in 2012, down from 31 the previous year. Orange County accounted for 32 reported hate crimes in 2012, the most for any county, and up from 26 a year earlier. Brevard County had the second most with 15, up from six the prior year.
Considering all of these numbers, the headlines should not scream about hate crimes being on the rise; they should be about how hate crimes rarely occur.
Yet, the media is homing in on the statistics that show that the number of reported hate crimes were the most in a single year since 2008.
Obviously, a hate crime is a bad thing. In a perfect world, hate crimes would not exist. But this is a far-from-perfect world. So we should take comfort knowing that the percentage of those affected by a hate crime has five zeroes after the decimal point.
Yet the newspapers trumpet that hate crimes are on the rise.
This kind of hyperbole recalls the statistics about New York City’s murder rate as portrayed by the television shows, such as “Castle” and “Law and Order,” set in the Big Apple.
According to some back-of-the-envelope math by Steven Lloyd Wilson, there are twice as many murders in TV’s fictional Manhattan than there are in real Manhattan.
Certainly every one of the victims of the 170 hate crimes in 2012 view the attacks as a serious matter. And they are. But the prevalence, or lack thereof, of hate crimes in Florida does not warrant the kind of media coverage it received.
