Hate Mail

[D_yer_Maker]

<p>More amateur profiling:</p>

<p>The Rector wrote this to the parents on-line: "The faculty, staff, and I are deeply saddened by this affront to our community. It is an outrage, and while only some were threatened directly, we all have been wounded by this."</p>

<p>Frankly, I think he's correct. This is really an attack on SPS.</p>

<p>I follow hate crimes closely and this is odd, even as hate crimes go. (My personal "favorite" -- because you just have to laugh sometimes -- were the guys who, amidst swastikas and other epithets, spray-painted, "Go back to your own country" on the garage of a Native American single mom in Billings, Montana.)</p>

<p>The reason hate crimes exist -- and why they are distinguishable from other crimes -- is because the intended victim of a hate crime isn't just the person who is directly attacked. Hate crimes are crimes that are intended to send a message to a broad audience by leveraging an attack (or isolated attacks) against a few. To leave law enforcement and the criminal justice system to treating each direct attack as nothing more than that creates a disparity that favors these criminals. It seems only fair, as I see things, for our criminal justice system to exact a punishment that matches the crime. If someone wants to leverage a few attacks into widespread fear among many other people, then there's no reason to handcuff ourselves and pretend that those other people weren't victims too. Hate crime laws are necessary to provided an appropriately measured form of justice to these crimes. Using that explanation of a "hate crime," I'm left wondering who the "indirect victims" are in this case.</p>

<p>Even though there aren't many facts available right now, it doesn't really fit as a "classic" hate crime so far. There was no need for so many letters. Two, maybe three, would do the trick. The whole point is to scare many by threatening a few. Here, the perpetrator seemingly tried to scare many by threatening them all...or maybe "just" most. But that's assuming that the intended indirect victims are black students.</p>

<p>Read the Rector's words again and consider who is being attacked and how those attacks are being leveraged to some broader end. I'm thinking -- guessing, actually -- that this was a broad direct attack at the school's black community that had a broader intended indirect reach to create an embarrassment and scandal that would reflect negatively and even threaten the entire SPS community. The school seems to be the indirect victim as the perpetrator seems to have pretty well struck most of the black students directly. One or two letters would have sent the same message to all the black students. But numerous letters seems to me to be more likely a message -- or indirect attack -- that's being directed at SPS.</p>

<p>Of course all of this is trying to use logic and reason to explain thought processes that, ultimately, are unreasonable and unjustifiable...so the odds aren't so great that my amateur analysis will mesh with what we later learn to be true. And if they DO mesh tightly with what the perpetrator was trying to do...yikes! Perhaps I shouldn't be too proud of that, eh?</p>

[HopefulDad]

<p>More amateur profiling:
My observation when this sort of thing happens in the South is the people doing it usualy fall into one of two groups. One is the backward redneck type that thinks he is getting a raw deal in life because everyone is getting all the breaks. The other category is occasionally a couple of rich kids who think the reaction to this sort of fun and games would be comical when it hits the news. We sometimes hear of yard cross-burnings, painting on sides of houses, etc. in rural areas still. Often in those cases,the acts follow large rounds of heavy drinking and cruising around town looking for trouble. The latest events we are hearing of are lower class people who feel the Hispanics in these states are somehow depriving them of job opportunities, and therefore must be driven out by any means possible, such as harrasment or robbery(as they are known to kepe their cash with them). Then of course, as mentioned above, there is always the possibility that one of the victims is the perpetrator(remember Tawanna Brawley?). I'm not trying to be the board southern culture expert, and this did happen in the North anyway, just speaking from my perspective and qualifying it as such. It sure would be interesting though to see what kind of spin the NYT would have put on it had it happened at a southern boarding school. For all you people that never get down to the south(other than to FL), don't believe all you read about the south in the NYT. Two years ago, I read a story in the NYT about how SC had more mobile homes than any other state. Is that really a noteworthy story for the NYT? I mean really, I used to live along the NC and SC line and within 5 miles of my house there were nearly a thousand homes in the $1 to $5 million range. I guess that wasn't humorous enough for the NYT southern correspondent to write about. Oh well, I am getting off topic....</p>