Employees, Customer Assaulted Outside Kroger Gang Violence

[NYC_SKP]

21. If you'll read the definition posted on the FBI website for "Hate Crime"....

Here, again:

Hate crime:

Defining a Hate Crime
A hate crime is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias.

For the purposes of collecting statistics, Congress has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.”

Hate itself is not a crime—and the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties.

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/civilrights/hate_crimes/overview

NB: I wrote this identical response to the story of teens who dumped urine and feces on an autistic kids head saying it was part of an ALS Bucket Challenge.

The burden of proof would be on the prosecution, which would have to show convincingly that the person in parking lot, the initial victim, was assaulted AND was selected for the assault based upon his race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.

Some interracial gang assaults are random, not race based, while others are race based and, thus, hate crimes by definition. This much seems obvious.

As I said, we'll have to see how the investigation develops.