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sc94597 on 27 March 2015
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Aura7541 said:
sc94597 said:

Certainly not the only way to measure the amount of racism/homophobia, but I think it is probably the best way we can measure it. It measures how many extremely hateful people there are that they'd commit crimes due to their hate. As for the criteria of the statistics it was the FBI who collected the information, not the state governments. Same with the Canadian statistics, it was their national statistics agency which collected the information. We can argue that the stastics might not be fully accurate, but that still puts them in the same order of magntitude 2/10,000 (for U.S) and 4/10,000 (for Canada.) Even if the United States missed out on one case for every one case with respect to Canada's stasticis agency, that would just put it at the same proportions as Canada. 

But we don't know how large the discrepancy is, so we shouldn't just assume the US miss out one one case for every one case in Canada. There are a lot of variables that need to be put into account such as cross state variation in hate crime laws, cross state variation in hate crime definitions, uneven collection, under reporting, difference in hate crime definitions between federal and state levels, proportion of the amount of hate crime prevention to the amount of hate crimes, etc.

It is easy to divide a number by another number and call it a day. However, you need to look into how and why did we get these numbers.

My point is, even if the discrepancy is 100%, which is very unlikely a case, they are in the same order of magnitude. The hate crime statistic was based on Federal law, not state law. I already said that.