SB 5280: No harm, no foul

Let me just say this out the gate: Hate crime laws are nebulous and rarely used. What we often perceive to be topics of hate crime are often vastly sensationalized by the relatively recent phenomenon of the court of social media. That isn’t to say that hate crimes don’t happen, because they absolutely do. The Kent man who was shot in his driveway by a man telling him to “ go back to your country ” is appalling and demoralizing. We often forget that we live close to such vitriol, and it strikes a nerve when it makes for national headlines. Yet the cases like the one above are not normal. Institutional and subversive racism exists in a far greater capacity than violent racism, but social media and some news organizations have a vested interest in grabbing these relatively rare occurrences and bringing them into the spotlight because of our preference for activism and our deep-seeded desire for something to point to in anger about what we find ill in society. Take, for example, the FBI’s 2015 hate crime statistics report . Eighteen people were killed and 13 were raped as a result of hate crimes. Meanwhile, a whopping 41.3 percent of hate crime victims suffered from intimidation and 37.8 percent were victims of legal simple assault, which does not involve actual physical conduct but merely the attempt. While these numbers shed light on the relative frequency of hate crimes, they come with a handful of caveats. The first and foremost being that not every hate crime gets reported and sent to the FBI. However, it is our responsibility as citizens to support legislators who operate on the basis of facts, not feelings and perceptions. We must consider legislation within the bounds of the information we have, even if it is imperfect. The other major caveat is that there is no data about hate crimes that have happened between the 2016 general election and today. This further feeds into our operation of perceptions, which the media has no small part in coordinating, and can be dangerous. The collection process for hate crimes is deeply flawed due to the lack of a requirement for local FBI offices to send in hate crime data, and so a significant portion don’t. That absolutely must change if we are to operate within the scope of fact. After all, feelings and perceptions were the driving mechanism behind the populist uprising of our current President, and I’m sure that liberals (with which I identify) were fine demanding a calm, cool, and fact-based rationale of conservatives when the hysteria over immigration was taking place. Is it appalling whenever these tragic acts of senseless and maddening violence happen near or far in our country? Of course. It pains me whenever I read an article describing it. But those events start spreading and quickly reach international publications often because of how relatively rare they occur compared to nearly every other crime. When it happens it throws us back into a time of lynching and murder, of dinner table racism. It makes us remember that these problems have not gone away yet. But what does this all mean in regards to SB 5280? It adds police officers to the classification of a protected group in terms of hate crime . I don’t see an issue with this. Hate crimes have a wide, non-limiting scope of categories that it can fall under, and I think the move toward occupation may actually be highly beneficial for an overlooked part of society: sex workers. It may seem like a far stretch to argue that legally making an assault on police officers a hate crime will help sex workers, but hear me out. This is the first step, at least for Washington state, for occupation to be added to the classification for hate crimes. I can only see a larger push in the future to make it a hate crime to assault, rape, or murder sex workers because they work in the sex industry, which is inherently making them more vulnerable. Between 1993-97, more than one fifth

of sexual assault victims who went to urban hospitals were sex workers. Additionally, the judicial system often makes it difficult for those workers to seek help, in some states depriving them of rape law protections at all. For this to end, there needs to be further protections on vulnerable occupations, occupations that society deems okay for a punching bag. Police officers included. That, I hope, is the direction this law will take us. But as it stands, I say no harm no foul. The hate crime law will play insignificantly in the grand scheme of things, even if it does conflate the prejudices and discrimination faced by people of color, different sexes, and gender orientation with what amounts to an army of highly trained, physically fit men and women armed to the teeth. Occupation may not be a permanent identity for which one is discriminated against, as you can just simply leave, whereas identities of race, gender, and sexual orientation are inseparable from ourselves. But the whole concept of a hate crime being law is already a bandaid to the larger societal problem of discrimination in the first place, of which we want to do away with completely. That will unfortunately only come with a lot of education and a lot more time. Reach writer Zackary Bonser at opinion@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @ZackaryBonser

SB 5280: No harm, no foul

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