Lesson Two - Deviance, Crime, and Social Control

Hate Crimes

In the early morning of January 4, 1998, a 65-year-old Sikh caretaker in Surrey, B.C., was beaten to death in the parking lot of the Guru Nanak Sikh temple by five white-supremacist skinheads, aged 17 to 25, as he was about to open the temple for early morning worship. The skinheads were part of a group that called itself White Power. They had been to an all-night drinking party when they decided they were going to vandalize some cars in the temple parking lot. They encountered the caretaker Nirmal Singh Gill and took turns attacking him. In trial it came out that the eldest of the skinheads had recently been released from the military because of his racist beliefs. Another had a large Nazi flag pinned to the wall of his apartment. In an intercepted telephone call from the investigation leading to the skinheads’ arrest, one was recorded as saying, “Can’t go wrong with a Hindu death cause it always sends a f’n message” (R. v. Miloszewski 1999). Attacks motivated by hate based on a person’s race, religion, or other characteristics are known as hate crimes. The category of hate crimes grew out of the provisions in the Criminal Code that prohibit hate propaganda (sections 318 and 319) including advocating genocide, public incitement of hatred, or the willful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group.

In 1996, section 718.2 of the Criminal Code was amended to introduce hate motivation as an aggravating factor in crime that needed to be considered in sentencing (Silver et al. 2004). In 2009 Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey on Victimization reported that 5 percent of the offences experienced by victims of crime in Canada were believed by the victims to be motivated by hate (approximately 399,000 incidents in total) (Perreault and  Brennan, 2010). However, police reported hate crimes totalled only 1,473 incidents in 2009. About one-third of the General Social Survey respondents said they reported the hate-motivated incidents to the police. In 2011 police-reported hate crimes had dropped to 1,322 incidents. The majority of these were racially or ethnically motivated, but many were based on religious (especially anti-Semitic) prejudice or sexual orientation. A significant portion of the hate-motivated crimes (50 percent) involved mischief (vandalism, graffiti, and other destruction of property). This figure increased to 75 percent for religious-motivated hate crimes. Violent hate crimes constituted 39 percent of all hate crimes (22 percent accounted for by violent assault specifically). Sexual-orientation-motivated hate crimes were the most likely to be violent (65 percent) (Allen and Boyce 2013).

Figure 7.11. In Canada, there were 1,332 reported victims of hate crimes in 2011. The General Social Survey suggests that only one-third of hate motivated incidences are reported to police. (Source: Allen and Boyce 2013) Source: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2013001/article/11822-eng.pdf