The first four words of the Los Angeles Times article give the game away. But that didn’t stop the big-box major metropolitan newspaper from blaring out its completely misleading headline: “Hate crimes in Los Angeles reach highest level since 2002, data show.”
Damn Lies and Statistics
“Reports of hate crimes” is how the lead sentence begins, and that is all you need to read to be able to correctly identify a thoroughly phony crisis cooked up in a progressive city with the active participation of its own police force. As Liberty Nation reported in 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department has zealously encouraged Angelenos to report hate “incidents” to police even if there is absolutely no scintilla of evidence that a crime of any sort has occurred. We even quoted a 2017 Los Angeles Times article on the issue.
“People have a right to say what they want. No matter how bad it is and how hurtful it is to other people,” L.A. Sheriff’s Department Detective Chris Keeling acknowledged to the paper. Then he ominously added: “We have to know those people are out there, but what we have to fight against is allowing that person’s statement to cause us to react in a negative way.”
Commander Horace Frank, assistant commanding officer of the LAPD’s counterterrorism and special operations bureau, told the Times that having information on private citizens guilty of wrongthink on hand in advance could help prevent hate crimes in the future. “Incidents quite often develop into crimes,” Frank said. “The last thing we want to do is to be on the responsive end as opposed to the preventive end.”
Fast forward a couple years and, lo and behold, reported hate crimes are through the roof. What a surprise. Yet instead of emphasizing that these are merely reported incidents and not actual proven cases involving successful criminal prosecution, the Times declares in bold lettering that hate crimes are surging in the City of Angels.
This low “hate incident” threshold in law enforcement is especially virulent in Britain, where careers can be destroyed and lives uprooted solely on unproven accusations of animus toward some “other.” “A hate incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender,” the U.K.’s Metropolitan Police website shockingly declares. “Evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. You do not need to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer thought that the incident was hate related.”
This deeply corrosive mindset has now migrated across the Atlantic and become firmly rooted in progressive U.S. cities such as Eugene, OR, Los Angeles, and Seattle. In the latter city, a similarly self-fulfilling scenario was hatched, in which citizens were encouraged to report “incidents.” A disturbing “spike” in hate crimes in the city was soon luridly discovered and decried.
“Not All Hate Crimes Result in a Hate Crime Conviction,” read a 2019 report by Seattle’s Office of the City Auditor that alleged a whopping 400% increase in hate crimes since 2012.
Fixation Becomes Their Reality
(Photo by Kasha Broussalian/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images)
The absurdly unquestioning Los Angeles Times article goes on to quote Professor Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. Based on that job title, one would think Professor Levin has a vested interest in having “hate and extremism” become a substantial problem in America. As the old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. Levin exposed the hollowness of this concocted calamity by telling the paper, “[h]ate crimes tend to go up in election years, and most recently, the most diverse and bluest cities are where we’ve been seeing some of the biggest increases.”
Not surprisingly, reports of hate crimes are far greater in blue bastions of progressive thought dominated by the very people who obsess nonstop over race, gender, and sundry other claims of discrimination and victimization. It’s a win-win all around for the inhabitants of these leftist urban bubbles. The local police get to cozy up to the politically correct forces – a refreshing change since the police are usually being criticized by them. The leftist media get to write up rabid accounts of extremism run amok in America, and manipulative politicians are allowed to preen about their determination to combat hate.
The losers will be the countless innocent Americans who face personal ruin, if not criminal conviction, as this rolling ball of dishonesty gathers momentum. Just look to the U.K. if you want to understand how this all ends. Police routinely question ordinary citizens merely for liking social media posts deemed unacceptable by authorities. In modern-day Britain, expressing your opposition to the full acceptance of the transgender agenda by hitting the like button on someone else’s Twitter post is enough to draw police attention.
By its own admission, the LAPD is determined to bring this same attitude to the United States, and a complicit media is helping it gather the false statistics required to bake this toxic cake. Their hate crime hysteria is more than merely a means to support comfortable progressive fantasies in blue urbanite enclaves: It is a serious threat to constitutional freedoms. When untruths are unchallenged and used to promote police action, the liberty of all Americans is threatened.
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