DO WE REALLY NEED NEW ANTI-ASIAN HATE CRIME LAWS?
IN MARCH, A man opened fire at Young’s Asian Massage, just north of Atlanta. Later, he shot up two more Atlanta-area Asian spas. All told, eight people were killed. Six of them were Asian women.
Was this a hate crime?
Clearly, it targeted a certain sort of business. In the immediate aftermath, people chalked the killings up to anti-Asian sentiment. Many were quick to implicate the Trump administration’s anti-Chinese rhetoric during the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, the shootings came amid a much-discussed uptick in alleged anti-Asian crimes. But neither the Atlanta massage parlor murders nor the broader narrative around anti-Asian incidents is so easily categorized.
The Atlanta shooter—Robert Aaron Long—told police he struggled with sex addiction. He was a devout Christian who felt guilty about visiting sex workers at Asian spas, friends said. Were Long’s hateful acts really about race? Or were they more about misogyny—a man lashing out at women for inspiring lust in him? How significant is the fact that the victims were largely Asian women? Was his true bias against sex workers?
In one sense, none of this makes a difference. Eight lives were senselessly lost. Long’s acts were morally heinous whether driven by anti-Asian racism, general misogyny, resentment of sex workers, or total randomness. And hate crime or not, murder is a serious criminal offense, punishable in Georgia by life in prison, with the possibility of life without parole or even execution.
Yet if Long was motivated by anti-Asian or anti-female bias, this would be considered, under Georgia and federal law, a hate crime. If he was motivated by hatred of sex workers, it would not. This ambiguity perfectly encapsulates the tangled logic behind U.S. hate crime laws.
Multiple high-profile bias crimes have gained attention in recent years: the 2020 shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black man killed by three white assailants; the 2019 massacre of nearly two dozen people at an El Paso Walmart by a 21-year-old white man who told police he was targeting Mexicans; the 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue that killed 11 congregants.
Looking at these tragedies, which often splay out in wall-to-wall media coverage for days or even weeks, it’s easy to understand the emotional appeal of hate crime laws. But there is no solid evidence that such laws have a deterrent effect on hate driven attacks. And as hate crime statutes have expanded, they have increasingly ended up penalizing people for getting mouthy with cops or otherwise punishing pure speech in violation of the First Amendment. Meanwhile, media coverage of hate crimes and “awareness” campaigns around them tend to distort Americans’ perceptions of the true frequency of bigotry and violence, exacerbating divisions and stirring up fear while giving strength to political agendas that threaten civil liberties and serve to uphold status-quo power. Hate crime laws might feel good. But it’s far from clear that they do good.
CONSTRUCTING A HATE CRIME EPIDEMIC
CRIMES ROOTED IN bias, prejudice, and identity-based hate have always existed, and too often they were greeted with insufficient concern. Attention to such crimes grew throughout the 20th century in tandem with the civil rights movement. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that the concept of “hate crimes” took off as a special category of criminal offense with enhanced sentencing possibilities.
The first state hate crime laws were passed in Oregon and Washington, based on model legislation drafted by the Anti-Defamation League. By 1992, most states had them. At the federal level, the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990 required the Department of Justice to tally up hate crime data from state and local law enforcement.
