#connor can be in the wrong while also acknowledging that the situation is another example of a conversation needing to be had

[lenodrysalad]

Wow, I'm sorry, but no. This outlet isn't exactly a pinnacle of journalism, but the slant, fact twisting, and lack of context in this article is infuriating. It's not presenting another side of the discussion, it's lying about what's being discussed in the first place. This is disingenuous "journalism," right down to how misleading the headline is in terms of tone and intention.

Saying the Oilers are just "complaining," and twisting the narrative into how fans and players are whining about Connor being punished for cross-checking Garland in the head, when that is not what anyone is saying at all. Hits to the head should be punished. Connor screwed up and he should face consequences.

The argument is about the failure of officiating that led to Connor's reaction in the first place (the inciting offense, which was not caused by McDavid, that should have been part of the discussion). It's about the lack of consistency in game-keeping and the excessive abuse certain players suffer that goes ignored and unpunished.

But this article and the twitter headline it references (and the people commenting who clearly haven't reading the whole interview) are taking one line of Perry's interview out of context and re-framing it as people condoning cross-checks to the head or arguing that Connor deserves special treatment. Which is not what Perry said, and not what people are talking about.

Star players aren't asking not to be held accountable or not to be judged by the same rules; they're asking to be allowed the same courtesy in return. Being skilled shouldn't mean others get a free pass to do whatever they want, and no one should have to risk their career, health, or public image just to defend themselves.

It's about the integrity and accountability of the league. It's about years of frustration, and Connor standing up for himself (while still agreeing the cross-check was the wrong way to go about it). This is what happens when countless infractions against specific individuals are allowed to occur with impunity. It's about having a much needed discussion regarding double-standards.

But these people can't handle that the double-standard isn't, "star players are coddled and get away with everything," like they always claim, but rather, "star players are being hung out to dry by the very league that claims to adore them."

A silent whistle must be deafening.

[scoops404]

i feel horrible. I feel betrayed and I’m depressed but strangely not surprised?

Its not even, not even about who is worse or whatever, i just- I heard connor eats pants talk, he said how george and the dream team, (even if they don’t acknowledge it,) have a large young girl audience. That’s the part of the audience that helped them grow.(And id say the audience who was the most emotionally, young girls or queer people who a lot of the time grew up presenting female or queer people in general, who are also at higher risk of getting used or assaulted ) and how its disgusting and disappointing to see them drop these weird points about consent and i (as a part of that demographic myself) - that really hit me in some way. That really hit me and something about it rings in my chest with hurt an realisation. It makes me incredibly sad, and yet it makes me realise stuff.

That point to me seems incredibly important.

That fact makes their statements seem ignorant..

Im slowly coming to terms with how I personally want to move forward with acknowledging their content, the content that was genuinely helping my depression and was part of my routine. So I didn’t formulate this to be some sort of statement, but more of a “oh” moment that i wanted to share

These men don’t feel like they care about the large audience they hurt.. young girls, and how their respective statements about consent could affect idk their world view? :/

Something i got reminded of when reading tumblr after watching that connor tiktok clip of his stream.

I see where you're coming from and what you're feeling is valid and it's entirely up to you if you want to stay or not

I just think that we've seen a lot of examples of them being good to women, in a professional sense as well as personally (as recent as Sapnap's birthday stream we saw George direct the camera away from Sylvee's skirt while she was climbing the wall). This is not a defense of George's behavior regarding the Caiti situation in any way, shape, or form, but we also can't erase the good behavior that we have witnessed, you know?

Like, I've left fandoms for petty reasons and big reasons (i used to love shane dawson, I used to love david dobrik, i went on a weird hate watch spree for a couple depressing months in like 2018 for the paul brothers--i'm not proud) and when a cc's behavior becomes clear, I drop their ass. Even through the drituation, I've never seen behavior from the dreamteam that I thought was hateful against anyone and I believe they've always shown that they want to do what's right when they do mess up.

Do I think they have room to grow? Yeah, absolutely. But I don't think they secretly hate women or are exploiting us. ((no matter what Hannah is saying now, they have had many close female friends for quite a while--Puffy, Sylvee, Gia--and I feel like those people wouldn't have stuck around if they were shitty to women constantly when off camera))

I don't think this incident with Caiti is just another in a long line of dubious consent situations (not that I can know). If I thought they were doing this behind the scenes all the time, I'd nope out. I'm hoping that they can take this as a learning moment and find greater nuance in consent. We are always learning and Dream, the most, has always shown he's willing to take criticism and realize why something was wrong and not do it again. We've seen this from George too when he apologized for old screen shots with slurs. They aren't perfect, none of us are, but I have hope that they'll move forward with a clearer idea.

To be quite honest, I have seen the conversations around consent morph in my lifetime. It's a wonderful thing to see women speaking up and being believed and consequences coming down on men when, historically, that has almost never been the case. We need to keep having these conversations and reinforcing the line, no matter how uncomfortable it can be.

As far as dream team not caring about their audience, I can't really disagree with that right now lol. I certainly don't really feel cared for, but I'm here more for my friends now at this point.

Keep thinking through what this means for you and how you want to move forward for yourself. there's nothing wrong with putting them down for a while. I see a trend of former fans burning the ground as they leave, but like, you can just leave or take a little hiatus from dreamteam, and that's absolutely fine! You can always change your mind and come back, or you can find something else and get super invested in that. No one is going to track what you're doing and judge you, I promise.

As far as content to help you through depression, I can't recommend Brittany Broski and Trixie and Katya enough. I've been listening to Trixie and Katya's Podcast, the Bald and the Beautiful, for my long commutes and they keep me laughing. I'd start with their "Unhhh" youtube series though because it's..... Hilarious

Sorry this got so long. Classic Scoops

[anneapocalypse]

Okay look. I don't care if you don't like Isolde. Not everyone's going to like every character, "She annoys me" is a perfectly fine reason to dislike a character, I'm not trying to make everyone like the characters I like.

But since you apparently felt so strongly about it that you needed to reply to my Isolde-positive post to tell me why you just really dislike Isolde, I think this is fair game for me to respond to.

So here's my serious defense of Isolde Guerrin.

Anne's Serious Defense of Isolde Guerrin

First let's get this out of the way: yes, Isolde is a privileged noblewoman. She has power and access and security far and above any commoner in Thedas, and she has the ability to exercise that power over others, and her actions can affect many. I am not arguing against any of that.

But I do want to talk about the reasons for her actions and the outcomes.

I realize there are various fan opinions on magic and the Circles, and I don't know what you, @bethlives, think about them personally. Maybe you do think the Circles are necessary and Connor, like all mage children, should have been sent away from his family at the first signs of magic, in which case, well, I can at least see where you're coming at this from.

On the other hand, if you think the Circle system is unjust, and that taking children forcibly away from their parents is wrong, and that mages are justified in trying to escape... I mean, I think Isolde trying to save her son from being taken to the Circle is a pretty sympathetic motivation, personally. I mean, maybe you disagree, and that's fine, and I don't want this post to turn into a debate about fictional magic, so if that's the case, let's just say that's the point on which we disagree.

I also don't agree that Isolde doesn't give a shit about Connor's magic. She makes a point of hiring him a private tutor so that he can control his powers. And I also want to say here that noble families hiding mage children and having them taught privately... it's a thing. And it doesn't always end badly. Lienne de Montsimmard in The Masked Empire is another example, and she seems to have grown into a perfectly competent mage; it's not demons but politics that ultimately gets her killed.

I said it in the original post, but I'm going to say it again; we have no reason to believe that things would have gone this badly for Connor if it weren't for Loghain's interference. Yes, magic is dangerous. Mages do need training--which Isolde tried to provide for her son! Connor became possessed because he was put into a high-stress situation (his father becoming deathly ill) while he was still largely untrained and vulnerable. There's no reason to believe that was inevitable. Loghain took advantage of the difficult position Isolde was in by offering "help" in the form of the apostate and blood mage Jowan, who besides being in Loghain's employ to assassinate the arl, was also maybe not the best tutor for a child. Isolde trusted Loghain, and had no way of knowing what would happen. So, short of giving up her son forever, I don't know what she was supposed to do differently to prevent this happening.

Another point that I don't often see brought up is that if Isolde had handed Connor over to the Circle, he might very well be dead. People will argue that Isolde was so stupid for not giving her son to the Circle, and the demon and the undead and everything is her fault... and then you go the tower and it's also overrun by demons and half the mages have been killed. So I'm not sure the argument that Connor would have been so much safer in the Circle really holds water with what we actually see in canon!

Maybe the takeaway here isn't "Isolde is dumb" but "even acknowledging the very real dangers of magic, the Circle system as it presently exists creates inevitable negative incentives that work counter to its stated purpose." Y'know?

As to the Knights searching for the Sacred Ashes... yeah, it's a long shot. But it's not like that was her first idea. Teagan tells us that they sent for healers, tried various treatments for Eamon, and nothing worked. The Urn of Sacred Ashes is a last resort. And yes, sending so many Knights away from Redcliffe is dangerous. You know what else is dangerous? The ruling lord being deathly ill, his only heir a possessed child. Isolde is desperate, for reasons both personal and political. She's taking desperate measures, not only to save her husband but to restore the stability of their land. And despite it being a desperate measure, she's actually right about the Ashes existing in Ferelden, and the merits of Brother Genitivi's research, so maybe she's not a complete idiot. The Disciples of Andraste and their militant zeal to keep anyone from discovering the Ashes' resting place is not something Isolde could have known about, as Genitivi himself wasn't aware of them until they captured him.

And I don't know, do I really have to defend a character for trying to save their spouse and child? Is that even something I'd have to defend, if it were a different character? If it weren't a woman with a bad French accent who's already been dismissed as stupid and annoying?

Anyway, that's what I have to say about Isolde. She was trying to save her kid from the Circle, and what happened next was mostly the result of Loghain's coup. If you still don't like her, that's fine. But I think her actions are actually pretty sympathetic, and I don't think she's as responsible for what happened in Redcliffe as people make her out to be.

Edited to add: I feel like mentioning here that I am in no way interested in defending Isolde making Alistair feel unwelcome at Redcliffe Castle, or the fact that her apparent insecurities seem to have been a factor in Eamon sending him away to the Chantry. While we don't know exactly what happened there, Alistair makes it pretty clear she made him feel not at home at the castle, and Isolde's greeting toward him as an adult is not friendly. It's certainly not her finest moment, no matter how isolated she may have felt as an Orlesian expat in Ferelden. (Not to say anyone has said or implied that I was defending that! I just thought it was worth adding.)

Isolde Guerrin owns actually. She fed information to the Fereldan resistance during the Orlesian occupation. She tried to save her son from being taken by the Circle, and so far as we know the only reason her plan failed is Loghain planted an assassin in her home. She volunteers to give her life for her kid without a moment's hesitation, she doesn't give a fuck that it's blood magic, she just wants to save him. If you insist Connor has to die, she pleads for his life in a voice performance that deserves awards, and if she's convinced that there's no hope for Connor, she insists on doing the deed herself.

[guardian-dragon-of-cats-landing]

I would like to say a couple words about Detroit: become human. FIRST OF ALL: 1)This is my personal opinion, and I don’t expect it to be shared by everyone 2) I didn’t actually buy the game, but I saw several walkthrough because I have no money and, even if I had them, I don’t want to financiate something involving David Cage. Potential spoilers! I didn’t like this game. Very simple. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about the graphic or the acting: both great. The chosen actors are talented and the dialogue are well written. Overall, the characters are good and mostly (mostly) also well written. Among all of them, I appreciated Connor. Apart from the fact that I love how he’s both a bamf and a dorky cinnamon roll, I like (almost until the end) how they show his path from “slave” to his duty to deviant, especially when he feels what Simon feels or when he has to shoot Chloe. His bromance with Hank is the best thing in the game. Hank himself is another wonderful character, and I loved how in the end he admits that his rage towards the androids is actually only dictated by his pain, and he even tries to make Connor see reason, in case the player make him stay a machine. In my opinion though, these are the only good things in this game. As for the bad things: 1) Is it me or Markus character is...plain? They show that the reason he rebel is that his father figure is either killed or becomes hostile towards him, and that can even be fine, but they never show actual rage. Actual sadness or confusion. He gets to Jericho and starts to help the others. Just like that. Show me some interior conflict! Some doubts! A bit of bewilderment! 2) Ignore the 3 rules of robotics? Yeah, let’s! 3) Every android is good. Really??? I mean, you want us to see them as living, thinking indivuduals, then how can you make them all good? Every bad thing they do is only because they got abused or tortured by humans. Non of them is simply bad. I agree that evil is not born but made, but this is a bit too unbelievable. 4) I think Connor and Kara’s motivations to become deviants are weak at best. Markus is attached to his master and sees him as a father figure, so it’s comprehensible, but let’s talk about the other two. Connor is the one with the strongest “anti-deviant” feeling, he’s been designed to be very hard to break and to feel nothing towards other androids, considering them and himself only as machines. It’s true that he has to face some situations where he’s forced to acknowledge the fact that he’s not so immune to feelings and that maybe he’s not completely a machine after all (depending on the player’s choices of course), but that’s it. There is not an actual trauma that brings him to become a deviant. Markus (or North) says a couple words and voilà! A deviant! It’s too little to work on! Kara’s reason is even worst in my opinion. She had her memory whiped, so she can’t remember Alice. She has no feelings towards her, no attachment at all. Nonetheless, after been with her for ten minutes, she has the strenght to become a deviant to protect her from her father. There are humans who won’t protect a child they barely know, so why a machines perfectly programmed to have no feelings? They want us to see that the process of becoming a deviant is very hard and stressful and comes from a trauma, but what Kara experiences is not enough! It would have been so much more believable if sha had known Alice for a long time, and one day she has enough to see her getting beaten up by her father. At least there would be the possibility to have formed some sort of attachment towards her. 5) The humans slaughtering? Really? If you have Markus choose to use a violent approach to free the androids, then it’s logical. But let’s say that you use the pacific approach: you don’t attack them, don’t react when they shoot you and so on. Theoretically, you decide that humans should not die, either because it’s not right or because you don’t want to have the public develop a bad opinion towards the androids. But then, when you have to escape Jericho, you happily shoot your way out, massacrating every soldier you find. Where’s the logic??? You are an android, with reflexes and aim far better than a human ones, so why not just knock them down without actually killing them? Yes, I know that the explosion could potentially kill them, but at least you are giving them a chance to recover and flee. It’s just not logical in a “peaceful approach path”. Let’s not even talk about the elevator scene with Connor. Despite my love for the kick-elbow-twirl-bang-bang move, he kills two innocent guards and, if he didn’t hack the camera, other 4-5 when the elevator stops. It is so out of character for him!!! Not because is a pure innocent angel, but because he could have easily knock them all down. He has no actual reason to feel the level of anger towards human that can bring him to happily slaughter everyone. No logic here either. 6) Alice father can be forgiven in one of the finale scenes. WTF WTF WTF????? WHAT THE FUCK??? Really??? Can we remember for a moment that, if you decide not to intervene or you fail to protect Alice, he kills both her and Kara? Yes, I know they are androids, but a man who has no problem beating, abusing and killing an android who looks like a 10 years old kid is clearly showing signs of mental instability if not even simple plain evilness. After all this, in the end it all gets resolved with “My wife took away my daughter so I abuse little android childs and android women because I miss her.” “Oh, okay then, all forgiven! You have a justification!” O.O!!! No!!! Justifying an abuser is wrong, doesnt’ matter if we’re talking about a videogame, a book or a movie! 50 shades of nope anyone?? 7) Sexism? Yes we can! Thanks David, you didn’t disappoint. After Heavy Rain and Beyond, here we are again! The only plot relevant women we see here (excluding Alice) are 5: Kara, North, the two girls at Eden’s and Rose. Three of them are sex workers (because women, duh!). Kara instead, guess what? She’s a mother. Because of course! Why showing a woman who is anything different than a prostitute or a mother? They could have have done such a wonderful job with Kara! She could have been the head of the revolution instead of Markus for example. She could have been something more than a mother figure. Instead, we have a perfect example of a good ol’ Cage style girl! We start with her being repaired because she had been beated “to death” by her owner (who, of course, looks like a collage of every abuser/rapist/pedophile ever used in a work of fiction), then we have her been beaten again (and potentially killed) by him, her being (potentially) so idiotic to let her and Alice sleep beside a psychotic android, her being restrained and at the mercy of a man who smuggles and experiments on androids, and eventually we have her naked (”android naked”, but still) and defensless, about to be killed. In the meantime, throughout all the game, what is she? A mother. Period. While Connor and Markus shape the future of the androids, the humans, and the entire world, she is just an android with mathernal instincts and nothing more. I like the fact that we can also see the revolution through the eyes of someone who just wants to survive without being a hero, but does it has to be the only female protagonist? Of course it does! Rose is neither a sex worker nor only a mother. One in 5. Not bad uh? Again, this is my opinion. If you want to discuss the game I’m more than happy, but don’t get your panties in a bunch if you don’t agree with me :)

[theconservativebrief]

Nia Wilson, 18, and her sister, 26-year-old Lahtifa, were simply changing trains at a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station in Oakland, California, on Sunday when it happened: A man suddenly approached them, stabbed Nia, and wounded Lahtifa. Nia was pronounced dead at the scene.

On Monday, John Lee Cowell, 27, was arrested for the attack, ending a one-day manhunt.

But the attack has remained in the news throughout the week as the public conversation has shifted to whether the attack — and the authorities’ purportedly slow response to it — was racially motivated.

To many people, the circumstances are obvious: Based on the reporting so far, Nia Wilson and her sister did nothing to provoke their attacker. Yet Cowell allegedly approached them and attacked anyway before running off. And since Cowell is white and Wilson is black, race has become the obvious motive in many people’s minds.

The situation was further inflamed because it took a day for police to catch the suspect, leading to protests in Oakland and other parts of California on Monday calling for justice.

Singer and Oakland native Kehlani captured much of the public sentiment in a tweet: “#BART manages to catch riders who haven’t paid ticket fair, young graffiti artists, you can catch a murderer. give her family some peace and get a murderous white supremecist off of oakland streets.”

The police, for their part, have said that they do not have any evidence that Cowell was racially motivated. “We don’t take anything off the table,” BART Police Chief Carlos Rojas said at a press conference. “While we don’t have any facts that suggest he is connected with any white supremacist group, we are going to explore all types of possibilities and options.”

A BART spokesperson also separately acknowledged some of the criticisms to the New York Times: “People are saying, ‘Why weren’t there officers there?’ There were two officers at that station, but it happened so quick. It all took 20 seconds.”

According to Rojas, officers were present at the train station platform in “maybe a minute,” but the attacker had fled by then.

Cowell’s family, meanwhile, released a statement on Tuesday claiming Cowell “was diagnosed with being bi-polar & schizophrenia” and “was living on the streets without the proper treatment.” Cowell also has a criminal record, including drugs, assault, and robbery, and was on parole for robbery at the time of Wilson’s murder.

There’s a reason, though, that this tragedy drew so much attention — there really is a solid amount of evidence that police are slower to respond to and solve murders in which black people are the victims. That racial disparity, along with other evidence of racial bias across America, lies in the background of the conversation over Wilson’s death, fueling distrust in authorities’ willingness and ability to respond to these kinds of killings.

As Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said in a statement, “Although investigators currently have no evidence to conclude that this tragedy was racially motivated or that the suspect was affiliated with any hate groups, the fact that his victims were both young African-American women stirs deep pain and palpable fear in all of us who acknowledge the reality that our country still suffers from a tragic and deeply racist history.”

One of the key concerns here is that killers of black people are often treated differently — meaning, more leniently — than killers of white people. This was at the front of protesters’ minds as they called for justice, due to a real worry that the killer here would not be caught without more public attention going to the incident.

The statistics bear out the concern. Wesley Lowery, Kimbriell Kelly, and Steven Rich recently reported for the Washington Post, based on an analysis of killings over the past decade in 52 of the US’s largest cities: “Black victims, who accounted for the majority of homicides, were the least likely of any racial group to have their killings result in an arrest, The Post found. While police arrested someone in 63 percent of the killings of white victims, they did so in just 47 percent of those with black victims.”

The result is less trust in the police. This is on top of the distrust fostered by what many minority communities see as a mix of abuse and harassment — the police shootings in which black people are disproportionately the victim, the police stops over petty crimes and drugs, the US Department of Justice reports showing that police officers often see people in minority communities as “subhuman,” and so on.

Journalist Jill Leovy explained in her award-winning book Ghettoside: “Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.”

So when police come in, it’s often in an abusive, abrasive manner that can lead to outright discrimination and excessive use of force. Meanwhile, police don’t appear to come in when they’re actually needed to solve the worst crimes. Black communities are both overpoliced and underpoliced, leading to distrust in law enforcement.

In the case of Nia Wilson’s death, the distrust led to protests. But this distrust has other, bigger consequences — helping explain the higher rates of violence in black communities.

This is a reflection of a concept of “legal cynicism”: When people don’t trust the law, they’re more likely to take the law into their own hands — and that can lead to violence. If someone thinks his family is under imminent threat, but doesn’t trust the police to protect them, then maybe he’ll take preemptive, perhaps deadly action on his own.

“This is what folks who rail against the focus on police violence — and pull up against that, community violence — get wrong,” David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College, previously told me. “What those folks simply don’t understand is that when communities don’t trust the police and are afraid of the police, then they will not and cannot work with police and within the law around issues in their own community. And then those issues within the community become issues the community needs to deal with on their own — and that leads to violence.”

Or, as Leovy put it in Ghettoside, “Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened. Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens.”

This is part of the context in which a lot of people were skeptical that Nia Wilson’s killer would be caught if protests didn’t draw more public attention to the case.

Shortly after Nia Wilson’s murder, local media outlet KTVU inflamed racial tensions further by showing a picture of Wilson holding what looked like a gun but was, reportedly, a gun-shaped cell phone case.

KTVU apologized for the incident. But it quickly drew a backlash because it seemed to portray the victim as guilty in some way — suggesting that she was somehow involved in violence. For black victims of killings, this is a portrayal that has popped up again and again.

We saw this, for example, after George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin in 2012, when people circulated fake pictures of a man flashing gang signs and claiming it was Martin. And we saw it with the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown, when the New York Times described Brown as “no angel.”

It’s a trend demonstrated in the research on race: The public and police are generally more likely to see black people as criminals and, therefore, perhaps more deserving of whatever happens to them.

A 2014 study, for example, found that people generally view black boys as older and less innocent starting at the age of 10. “Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection,” Phillip Goff, an author of the 2014 study, said in a statement. “Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.” Another study produced similar findings for black girls.

One series of studies, released last year, used various visual tests to see how people perceive the bodies of white and black men. The findings were consistent: When participants believed the man in the images was black, they generally saw the man as larger, more threatening, and potentially more harmful in an altercation than a white person. And they were more likely to say use of force was justified against the black men than against the white men.

And another study published in 2015 found people tend to associate what the authors call “black-sounding names,” like DeShawn and Jamal, with larger, more violent people than they do “white-sounding names,” like Connor and Garrett.

“I’ve never been so disgusted by my own data,” Colin Holbrook, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. “The amount that our study participants assumed based only on a name was remarkable. A character with a black-sounding name was assumed to be physically larger, more prone to aggression, and lower in status than a character with a white-sounding name.”

This is just a small sampling of the research, which has consistently found evidence of racial bias.

This is, again, part of the context behind the outrage over Nia Wilson’s death: There was a real concern that, without pressure from the public, the media and police may see Wilson as a deserving victim and sweep her murder under the rug.

Now that police have arrested a suspect, the next question is whether police will charge him with a hate crime. So far, Cowell has been charged with first-degree murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and theft, according to the New York Times. But not a hate crime.

For law enforcement, this gets to a particularly tricky part of the law: It’s hard to prosecute a hate crime.

A crime, like murder, can be elevated to a hate crime when law enforcement demonstrate that racism or some other act of hate motivated the act.

“It could be an act of trespassing or vandalism. It could be a violent crime, like rape or murder,” Jack Levin, an expert on hate crimes at Northeastern University, previously told me. “But when the motive involves targeting someone because of a difference, then it becomes a hate crime.”

An example: A man walks into a lesbian bar and attacks one of the women there. This attack would be considered assault and battery, maybe even attempted murder, under the law.

But would it be a hate crime? For prosecutors and police officers, there would be several factors to consider before pursuing hate crime charges: Did the attacker yell anti-gay or sexist slurs, or otherwise say anything explicitly anti-gay or sexist? Does the attacker have a history, perhaps on social media or in other writings, of homophobia or sexism? Did the attacker purposely target a lesbian bar, or was the location irrelevant to his actions?

Investigators would piece all of this together, building up evidence to decide if there’s enough to meet standards of proof for a hate crime charge and conviction. There’s no hard rule here, and whether something is deemed a hate crime can vary from officer to officer, prosecutor to prosecutor, judge to judge, or jury to jury. But generally, once there’s a certain threshold of evidence that the attack was motivated by hate, an otherwise run-of-the-mill crime can become a hate crime.

Targeting someone’s motive makes it difficult to actually prosecute hate crimes. After all, many criminals are not going to be dumb enough to blurt out their exact motives in the course of committing a crime.

“The problem is not all hate-mongers are stupid,” Levin said. “They may not let you know that they hate the members of a particular group. They may realize that they’re better off not voicing a racial slur or [putting] racist graffiti on a sidewalk or wall of a building.”

For investigators, this is always going to make it difficult to definitively prove that an act is a hate crime. So while they might be able to land a conviction for, say, assault in the example of a man attacking a lesbian bar, they may not be able to get convictions for a hate crime.

So far, police have said in Cowell’s case that they have not found proof that the attack is linked to racism. But the investigation is still early.

If police and prosecutors find proof the murder was motivated by race, it could validate what protesters are saying. But if they can’t uncover any evidence, that may leave a lot of people unsatisfied with the outcome of a trial — and may lead to more tensions over Nia Wilson’s death.

Original Source -> The protests over Nia Wilson’s murder, explained

via The Conservative Brief