The commission ought to consider the inherent vagueness and subjectiveness of the nature of the designation in practice.
I recall reading somewhere (in a Xahar post, iirc) that hate crime status is often added on in investigative phase and not reviewed in the vast majority of cases. There is a valid argument to the idea that hate crime status says more about how we as a society see crimes rather than anything about the crimes themselves. This means that frequently it is wishcasting. If it's not fashionable to see something as a hate crime, it won't get labelled as one, and vice versa.
This is interesting- it’s similar I suppose to how LGBT hate crimes laws were once opposed because people wanted to pretend that it either didn’t exist or even worse... was justified. I’ll look into getting this into the bill but happy to hear more on it from you and others
I guess if there is anything I would add at this point it is that hate crime data is not as "scientific" as it would be in an ideal world, in part because the very concept is fundamentally an effort to distinguish bigotry-driven crimes from non-bigotry-driven crimes, and that is less of a hard break in reality than many would like.
I would favor the creation of a division within the relevant Federal Department who oversees the matter, tasked with looking at hate crimes (and if the resources so exist, crimes that might fairly be considered such but weren't) after the fact and seeing if events over the course of the legal system's proceedings in relation to the deeds show that the initial categorization was warranted. But I understand if that is too mighty of an effort to be feasible.
