The Associated Press is reporting an increase in the number of hate crimes in Los Angeles:
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Hate crimes in Los Angeles County soared last year to their highest mark in five years even as overall crime dropped across the region, according to a report obtained by The Associated Press.
The annual report, to be published Thursday by the county’s human relations commission, shows 763 hate crimes were reported in 2007, a 28 percent increase from 2006.
The numbers buck last year’s overall crime trends, which saw a decrease of 6 percent in Los Angeles County and 5 percent in the city of Los Angeles, the report notes.
The most common hate crimes were those motivated by race, with 310 committed against black people and 125 against Latinos. However, crimes in which anti-immigrant slurs were used dropped slightly.
So 125 hate crimes against Latinos and 310 against blacks: that’s 435 of the 763 hate crimes reported, meaning that 328 hate crimes — the largest group — were suffered by people who weren’t black or Latino. So, AP, who were they? Whites, Asians, Jews, Native Americans, homosexuals, what? Aren’t they worth reporting about?
Of course, the AP being the AP, the meat of the black-Latino issue is well and truly buried: a lot of the crimes are black-on-Latino and Latino-on-black, and a lot of those are gang related.
The extent to which race is driving the area’s gang crisis is a subject of ongoing debate. Sheriff Lee Baca has said he considers it a major factor, while Los Angeles police Chief William Bratton and other officials downplay suggestions of racial tension.
The report notes that friction between black and Latino residents continues to be a major instigator of hate crimes. There were 116 hate crimes unrelated to gangs that were committed by Latinos against blacks and 26 such crimes committed by blacks against Latinos.
There’s a big difference between having a hate-crime problem and have a problem with rampant gangsterism, even if that gangsterism has a racial edge. Criminal gangs have traditionally had ethnic affiliations (the Italian mafia, the Russian mafia, the Mexican mafia — you don’t hear about the Multicultural Mafia), but in the “progressive” mind of the AP, “hate crimes” means first and foremost crimes against blacks and Latinos — even when there are more hate crimes committed against non-blacks and non-Latinos than against those groups, because the progressive narrative insists that racism (meaning white racism; progressively routinely deny that any other kind exists) is the fundamental organizing principle of American society.
Of course, some of this is trivial; for instance, Mexican-Americans pretty regularly abuse other Mexican-Americans with epithets suggesting that the recipient of said abuse is a recent and not entirely legal immigrant. Presumably, a Latino-on-Latino crime in which such a term is uttered is reported as a “hate crime” under the “anti-immigrant” column, but the “hate” aspect of the the crime is incidental. Likewise, gangsters tend to be, for the most part, people whose manners are not those of middle-class college graduates, and terms of racial abuse are a ready part of their vocabulary. But it’s not at all clear that racial animus is anything like a prime motivating energy for a lot of crimes that formally fit the definition of a hate crime.
This sort of observation is, apparently, literally unmentionable in an Associated Press report.