These statistics provide, at best, a rough picture. But while the stats consistently indicate blacks commit a disproportionate number of hate crimes, police on all levels also consistently report that blacks are by far the most frequent victims of hate crime. Between 30 and 40 percent of all hate crimes, locally and nationally, are committed against blacks, and the vast majority of the suspects in these crimes are white. This, at least for some, justifies the way hate crimes are addressed by police and media. Seventy percent of America is white.
Institutional power is still in the hands of whites.
Levin points out that the U.S. Supreme Court case that gave constitutionality to hate-crime laws on a federal level was Todd Mitchell vs. the State of Wisconsin in 1993, a case in which the attackers were black and the victim white. Indeed, to suggest that law enforcement turns a blind eye to black hate crime makes some crime experts cringe. One incident was caught on videotape and widely broadcast. Some publicly wondered why those youths were not charged with hate crimes. The victims had been beaten up and robbed.