IREHR President at UMKC School of Law Conference

On June 4, IREHR’s Leonard Zeskind served on a panel on “Religiously Based Hate Crimes & Persecution at the University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law’s conference on “Law and Religious Freedom.”

On June 4, IREHR’s Leonard Zeskind served on a panel on “Religiously Based Hate Crimes & Persecution at the University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law’s conference on “Law and Religious Freedom.”

Zeskind noted that anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry against gays and lesbians were all perfectly legal in the United States, and usually protected by the First Amendment.  He also said that a crime must be committed before its motivations can be measured and a determination made of whether or not a hate crime has been committed.  So, if bigotry is not a criminal matter to be adjudicated in the courts, it must be judged and answered in the public mind, in the realm of civil society.

Zeskind also averred that the data collected by the Uniform Crime Report and by the Hate Crimes Statistics Act are not good instruments by which to actually measure the amount of racially motivated crime or crime motivated by anti-Semitism, or to measure Islamophobia or homophobic violence.  There are big holes in the reporting web.  There are always a number of jurisdictions that simply will not comply with reporting standards. 

Even if the police and the local jurisdiction are willing to prosecute and report these crimes, he argued, the bald fact is that what is called hate crimes is too much like sexual assault and rape.  It requires the victim to speak up and out. And often they are simply too afraid of the perpetrator or too afraid of the local police.