(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) Leftists in New York City have discovered that, while local politicians like to talk tough on “hate crimes,” they don’t seem able to secure convictions, according to a report in The City.
Using data obtained from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, The City found that only 15% of hate crime arrests “resulted in a hate crime conviction.”
Of 569 hate crime arrests between 2015 and 2020, 65% resulted in convictions, but only 87 (15%) resulted in a conviction on the initial charge.
The City spoke to several “hate crime experts” who claimed that, while hate crimes rhetoric is attractive to virtue-signaling politicians, the crimes themselves are very hard to prove in a court of law.
“If you are a politician, if you are a councilman, if you are a representative of a certain community, you better darn well speak in a way that’s going to sound like you’re going to protect that community,” a professor of criminal justice at CUNY’s John Jay College told The City. “The language of protecting a community and the difficulty of proving a case are two different things.”
“There’s a disconnect between the sentiment and being able to prove the elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt for an ethical prosecutor,” another lawyer told the paper. “You have to prove that there’s some targeting based on ethnicity or religion or some other protected class.”
Others told The City that criminals have no added fear of crime prosecutions, proving that the tactic is “a bad tool.”
“Hate crime prosecutions are just a bad tool for addressing this problem, in much the same way that the Hate Crime Unit of the NYPD is not a great tool for addressing the problem,” the director for strategic projects at Jews for Racial & Economic Justice told The City.
New York City has seen a spate of seemingly racially-motivated crimes of late.
Last week, a 70-year-old Sikh man was assaulted by a black man while walking, and a Hasidic Jew was assaulted by a group of black teens.
