Terrorism and Hate Crimes in America
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to shed light on terrorism and hate crimes and their occurrence in the United States. It intends to start by laying the foundation including the definitions of the two terms, their historical developments, and occurrence in the US. The paper shall highlight some few cases of the two and how they affected the population of the country. It shall then look into some law enforcement agencies that have the mandate and duty to deal with the occurrence of both terrorism and hate crimes. The writer shall also analyze some actions that such law enforcement agencies and bodies can undertake to prevent and stop the two crimes. It shall see how they can take steps towards protecting civilians and the general population from the effects and damages that terrorism and hate crimes bring about. The paper shall then highlight the police work in the same and how different stakeholders, including the public, governments, and law enforcement bodies can contribute or disallow such occurrences.
Introduction to terrorism
Terrorism is a word that connotates the use of violence and intimidation to cause fear aimed at civilians and public populations for political or other social reasons. It is a crime that most scholars, writers, governments and societies term as morally wrong. Most perpetrators of such acts may do so out of the extreme beliefs that they are fighting for justice, or some other religious or higher power (Schuurman, 2019). However, in all instances, such acts of terror cause a lot of damage, harm, and losses to the population and goes beyond the people that the terrorists are against. It is an inhumane act that spills over its atrocities to innocent people who may not even be aware of what may be going on. According to Interpol, terrorism may encompass a variety of threats such as organized crimes in conflict areas, foreign terrorist fighters or even radicalized lone perpetrators. They may make use of weapons including nuclear, biological, explosive devices, chemical or radiological. The word terrorism has also grown to encompass acts such as massacres, assassinations, scalping, pillaging, genocide, widespread violence, arson, and vehicle sabotage.
While the history of terrorism is hard to pinpoint, several scholars have pointed out such occurrences as the Sicarii in the first century CE going against people in support of the Roman rule or the Jews. They quickly stabbed their targets in public using daggers and leaving them to die. Other scholars have tied it to the French Revolution between 1793 to 1794. The term terrorism emerged from the words reign of terror when the French government meted a lot of violence against the people they believed to stand against the revolution. These all shows the perpetration of tourism against others based on political and ideological differences. In cases where one did not share the same thinking and belief as another, one group would resolve to violence, either in an attempt to stop the other, get their attention, or try to change their mindset. However, one constant occurrence was that terrorism led to the loss of lives and damage to property. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (2018), until recently, most terrorism acts followed the actions of states in armed conflicts when it came to the issues of targeting. They could differentiate between enemy combatants and their targets, and the innocent civilian populations. The paper provides the example of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914. However, with the development of modern technology, there has been the production of weaponry that can lock down a specific target. The new weapons adopted an indiscriminate aspect where they went beyond the target and eliminated even the people around the target, This case of ‘total wars’ became the norm in the twentieth century totally disregarding the principle of distinction. Such weaponry has included high-level bombing capability devices and weapons of mass destruction. The September 11th attack is an example of this where the more than 3,000 victims of the bombing were civilians.
Several authors point out that there are various types of terrorism acts. These range from state sponsored terrorism, where one state or government goes up against another to dissent groups within a given nation rebelling against their government. The other type is the left and right terrorists who root their actions on political ideologies and the religious extremists who perpetrate crimes in the name of certain higher beliefs. There are also criminal terrorists who primarily focus on some financial benefit from the criminal actions. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), terrorism falls under two auspices, that is domestic and international. Domestic terrorism involves a group or individual operating entirely within the US, intending the unlawful use or threatened use of violence and without any foreign direction. International terrorism, on the other hand, transcends national boundary such as the actions of the Al-Qaida terrorist networks.
In the US, the bodies responsible for dealing with terrorism include the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. These gain their mandate pursuant to the Homeland Security Act of 2002. These federal bodies house agencies such as the BI, Secret Service, Coast Guard, and Border Patrol. They undertake duties that counter terrorism acts before their happening. The agencies work together to keep the country safe by the formation of several taskforce and joint action groups to deal with such threats that may occur within the country. The US counter terrorism strategy includes plans to identify and neutralize threats of a terrorist nature by defusing their organization and networks thus rendering them incapable of violence, intimidation or coercion. Some of the actions that such agencies can undertake include ensuring cooperation between agencies even across national borders. This case is because terrorist actions affect more than just one country. As a result, agencies that have the mandate to deal with such cases should work together by sharing information and joining forces to completely destroy terrorist organizations. According to the National Commission on Terrorism (2000) the law enforcement bodies such as the Central Intelligence Agency should also use all their resources to gather intelligence on the plans of such groups before they can put them to action. The government also needs to come up with policies that target states that support terrorism or the financing fronts of the same. Even with all these steps in place, the government still needs to come up with guidelines to help the civilian population in case of an attack such as biological or chemical weapons.
Hate Crimes
Hate crimes refer to offences that a perpetrator commits against another person because of their differences. These are biases that someone might have against another for belonging or perceived relation to a different social or political group (Naidoo, 2017). At the federal level, the grounds against which people commit hate crimes include color, gender, age, disability, religion, race, ethnicity, national origin, or sexual orientation. The victims only wrong in such cases, is belonging to the group that the perpetrators have bias against. The crimes involved in most cases range from threats to the actual commission of offences such as assault, vandalism, arson, or murder. These acts are grievous because they affect the victim, and those around them, including their community and the whole society.
Hate crime is not a modern phenomenon but has existed in the history of the US for a very long time. Crimes driven by differences based on race were the norm before the civil war. Pezella (2017) state that hate crimes have existed for as long as the history of America extends. The colonial era saw various crimes committed against loyalists in the different colonies. These continued into the United States to the antebellum in the twentieth century. Slavery existed as a dividing plane between the white masters and the black slaves. The slaveowners treated the slaves as mere chattels and property to use as they pleased. Although at the time, society had not coined the term hate crime, it was in existence. The births of bodies such as the Ku Klux Klan showed the extremities of such violence as lynching when the groups that they considered a minority, that is, African Americans and Mexicans, seemed to be advancing at the expense of the whites. Hate crimes have lived on to the current century and expressed through movements for the progression of the rights of such groups as women, persons with disabilities, and the LGBTI communities.
In the US, the government came up with the Hate Crimes Statistics Act in 1990. This case was facilitated by the increasing number of such occurrences of which some went unreported. The Act led to the creation of two primary bodies for collection and analysis of the data related to hate crimes. These agencies included the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and Crime Victimization Survey. The FBI UCR statistics come directly to the FBI from the various law enforcement agencies around the country. In line with the same, in 2018 alone, a total of 2,026 law enforcement agencies reported 7,120 hate crime incidences involving 8,496 offences. Out of these figures 7,036 were single-bias incidences while there were 84 multiple bias cases. These numbers show that although much steps have been taken to minimize and curtail such prejudiced crimes; the country still needs to do more.
According to Williams et al. (2020), hate crimes have moved to the online platforms with the development and growth of the digital era. Governments have acknowledged the use of such online platforms as Twitter and Facebook among others as avenues for hate speech targeting specific groups such as Muslims and blacks. Data from the police in England and Wales shows that the highest hate crime rates in history recorded in 2017 and 2018 in the two countries at 94.098. This figure is very high despite the progress that the whole world has made towards equality and nondiscrimination. In the US, the prosecution of criminal offences has remained the purview of the states for a long time. However, this was not always the case. Naidoo (2017) outlines how in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the federal government enacted the federal criminal civil-rights laws to prosecute offences including hate crimes. The result was a slow and costly process that the courts barely interpreted well. As a result, the delegation of such roles to the states has facilitated the reporting and prosecution of more cases.
Law enforcement agencies at both the state and federal levels have taken a more proactive role in collecting data, and prosecuting the perpetrators of such offences. There have also been the development of several state laws to provide the auspices under which to deal with such cases. While most state laws cover the basic areas that the federal government outlines, others have moved on to include biases on groups and classes such as the homeless, creed, ancestry, firefighters, and employment as a law enforcement officer. These are all well-intended although hate crimes still exist. Law enforcement agencies need to work together to not only inform the public about the negative effects of hate crimes but also consequences that the same can have. They need to put in place stringent punishment provisions. The community members also have a role to play in stopping and preventing hate crimes. They should report cases and potential perpetrators to protect one another. Over the years, instances of hate crimes have moved in circles. When one group attacks another, the other group makes an effort to retaliate in kind. As a result, there is a need for different communities and groups to come together to put a stop to the cycle and promote peaceful coexistence.
References
Naidoo, K. (2017). The historical prosecution of hate crimes in the United States of America. Fundamina, 23(2), 21-38.
National Commisiion on Terrorism (2010). Countering the changing threat of International terrorism. Retrieved from https://fas.org/irp/threat/commission.html
Pezzella, F. S. (2017). The Legacy of Hate Crimes in American History. In Hate Crime Statutes (pp. 13-27). Springer, Cham.
Schuurman, B. (2019). Topics in terrorism research: reviewing trends and gaps, 2007-2016. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 12(3), 463-480.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2018). Introduction to International Terrorism.
Williams, M. L., Burnap, P., Javed, A., Liu, H., & Ozalp, S. (2020). Hate in the Machine: Anti-Black and Anti-Muslim Social Media Posts as Predictors of Offline Racially and Religiously Aggravated Crime. The British Journal of Criminology, 60(1), 93-117.