This is the Katori Daily Podcast for Saturday, April 17th, 2021 on Caleb Brown.

Following new claims of a rise in anti-Asian violence in the US,

lawmakers appear less than anxious about the expansion of hate

crime laws now simmering in Congress.

Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

We discuss the problem of gathering data on hate crimes and why that matters.

Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Subscribe to the Cato Daily Podcast anywhere you please and follow us on Twitter at Cato Podcast.

Hate crimes are usually conceived as crimes that are motivated by an aversion or dislike for people's membership in some protected category.

Could be race or religion, but other categories are also covered by the various statutes. Now there are differences in how people define it though and

it's sometimes objected that crime done by someone who hits their victim should count as hate crime, but that's not usually the way the laws are drafted.

Okay, so hate crimes as a group are when we are trying to nail down whether or not a

specific crime was a hate crime what do police do are they looking for

magic words are they looking for a pattern of conduct that preceded the crime?

It is far from a science and depending on what the crime is and where and by which department

it's investigated, you can get very different answers on that.

You can certainly take the testimony of the victim, of the, sometimes of the perpetrator,

or of witnesses as to whether or not there were slurs, for example.

That would be typically the most likely kind of evidence.

But you can also look at the history if there's a history of relations between the accused person and the defendant.

And although we get into questions of whether a court would accept this as evidence you might possibly look at

unrelated things said or written by the accused perpetrator.

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