‘No doubt ... it is a hate crime’
Alleged white supremacist arrested in mass shooting at historic church in Charleston
For one hour, police say, Dylann Roof sat through a prayer meeting with the people he was about to kill.
It was evening in Charleston, S.C., and a small group of worshippers were gathered at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Roof, a slight 21-year-old dressed in hiking boots, sat among church members including Cynthia Hurd, 54, a longtime librarian whose death would prompt the immediate closure of all of Charleston’s 16 public library branches.
Also in attendance were Susie Jackson, 87, and Ethel Lance, 70, two grandmothers who had been with the church for decades. And Tywanza Sanders, 26, a recent business graduate from nearby Allen University.
The Wednesday night prayer meeting included Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a church pastor and South Carolina state senator. Within hours, his desk at the South Carolina State House would be draped with black cloth and a single red rose.
Roof had entered the church and asked for Pinckney, and sat next to the pastor during the meeting. Parishioners encouraged the unknown young man to join in and, according to Charleston police Chief Gregory Mullen, Roof even prayed with them.
It was only at meeting’s end, at about 9 p.m., that Roof pulled out an automatic pistol of unknown make and calibre, and fired point blank.
By the standards of the alltoo-common U.S. mass shooting, Roof was unusually deliberate. Very few wounded would leave the church that night, and the shooter would reload five times.
Most victims died at the scene, and the only witnesses who survived unscathed, reports said, were a five-year-old girl who played dead, and a woman Roof spared so she could “tell the world what happened,” according to a witness account.
Victims tried to reason with the shooter as the massacre progressed, but to no avail.
“I have to do it,” he replied, according to an NBC interview by Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of Pinckney. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
Nine people died, six women and three men. Three of the slain were senior citizens.
While victims lay dying, the shooter left the scene in a black sedan with a front licence plate bearing the insignia of the Confederate States of America, the short-lived country which comprised the slaveholding “South” during the U.S. Civil War.
Social media images of Roof also showed him wearing a jacket adorned with the old flags of Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, the white minority-ruled predecessor to Zimbabwe.
After an all-night manhunt, Roof was captured without incident in Shelby, N.C., 400 kilometres northeast of Charleston. Police had been barraged by tips in the hours after a surveillance camera image of Roof was released to the media. One tipster was a childhood friend who remembered Roof’s clothing from a recent video game session they had held together.
Almost immediately, police announced they were treating the mass-murder as having been motivated by hate.
“In this case, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it is a hate crime,” police chief Greg Mullen told reporters.
The site of the massacre is one of the oldest black churches in the United States, with roots stretching well back to the era of slavery.
“Where you are is a very special place in Charleston, and it’s a very special place because this church and this site … has been tied to the history and life of African-Americans since about the early 1800s,” Pinckney told a civil rights gathering in 2013.
One of the church’s founders, a free black man named Denmark Vesey, was executed in the early 1800s for organizing a slave rebellion, and a church on the site was burned in retaliation.
As U.S. President Barack Obama noted in a statement about the mass murder, “this is a church that was burned to the ground because its worshippers worked to end slavery.”
The shooting is the deadliest attack on a U.S. place of worship in recent memory, although it fits among a recent string of suspected white supremacists attacking religious facilities.
BLACKS EXPERIENCE THE MOST HATE CRIME
FBI hate crime data show that more than 50 out of every one million black citizens was the victim of a racially motivated hate crime in 2012, the highest among any racial group. But this is almost certainly an undercount. The FBI is reliant on state and local law enforcement agencies to categorize and report hate crimes correctly. There is general agreement the FBI numbers are significantly lower than they should be.
HATE CRIME RATES STABLE OVER PAST DECADE
The Bureau of Justice Statistics provides the most comprehensive overall count of hate crime incidents. Their data, drawn from interviews with victims, shows the number of hate crimes occurring has remained fairly constant over the past 10 years, hovering between 200,000 and 300,000 annually. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of active hate groups, which it defines as “groups having beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics,” more than doubled from 457 in 1999 to 1,018 in 2011. Since then the number of active groups has declined to 784. The SPLC attributes this to various causes — including widespread squabbling and splintering within the groups themselves.
HATE GROUPS CONCENTRATED IN DEEP SOUTH, NORTHERN PLAINS
Hate groups aren’t distributed evenly by geography. Controlling for the population in each state, hate groups are concentrated mostly in the Deep South and in the Montana/Idaho region. Vermont and New Hampshire also stand out. Partially, this is a function of low population — Vermont has fewer than 700,000 residents, which combined with its four active hate groups gives it a high per capita value. But this may not just be an artifact of low population. Researchers at Humboldt State University recently mapped geocoded tweets containing hate speech, and their map does appear to show a high incidence of hate-tweets originating in Vermont.
HARDSHIP BREEDS HATRED
Researchers have tried to suss out the causes of hate crime. A 2002 review of hate crime literature by Princeton economist Alan Krueger looked at the economic determinants of hate crime — whether these crimes rose and fell in response to economic conditions like poverty rate and unemployment. Krueger concludes that “rather than economic conditions, the hate crimes literature points to a breakdown in law enforcement and official sanctioning and encouragement of civil disobedience as significant causes of the occurrence of hate crimes.” Not so fast, say economists Matt Ryan and Peter Leeson. In 2010 they examined the links between hate groups and hate crime in the United States. They found no relationship between the number of hate groups in a state, and the number of hate crimes that occur within that state. Instead, the primary determinants seem to be economic.