Charleston tragedy puts spotlight on hate crime laws

“In this case there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind it is a hate crime,” said Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen.

However, South Carolina is one of only five states nationwide without hate crime laws. The other four are Arkansas, Wyoming, Georgia and Indiana.

On Thursday, federal officials said they would investigate Wednesday night’s shooting, where nine people were killed during a prayer service at a historic African American church, as a hate crime.

“Hate crimes go back a long way,” said Tom Barry, a sociology professor at Central Oregon Community College in Bend. “All societies have hate crimes.”

Hate crimes are defined by the FBI as a criminal offense against a person, motivated by bias against race, religion, disability, ethnic origin, and, most recently, sexual orientation.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, around 300,000 hate crimes have been committed in 2012. That number has been holding steady for the last 10 years.

The Southern Poverty Law Center finds unemployment and poverty are strongly connected to hate crimes.

“It is because of their own economic struggles, their own struggles that they’re experiencing in society,” Barry said. “It means that group becomes a target. This group becomes to be blamed for their own circumstances, when of course it’s much more broad than that, it’s a lot of different things. It means this group becomes a scapegoat.”

In the U.S., the majority of hate crimes in 2012 were racially motivated, according to the FBI. Of those, over 60 percent were committed against blacks.

At the same time, the number of hate groups has been slowly declining over the last ten years. Of the known 784 hate groups nationwide, currently there are nine located in Oregon, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Those groups are predominantly made up of white supremacists.

“Hate crime legislation is about protecting vulnerable groups or groups that have been targeted historically,” Barry said.

So far, numerous attempts to pass hate crime laws have failed. South Carolina Republicans, including Gov. Nikki Haley, said that federal laws are sufficient and that the state does not need its own hate crime law.