Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226% increase in hate crimes

CatHedral said:

The irony is that the traitriots with their antivax, antiscience and anti-social programs stance are killing far more of their own offspring.
It effectively illustrates their collective psychosis.

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CatHedral said:

That was rabbit somebody

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Three Berries said:

Hate crimes are BS. I can murder a white man and it's just plain old murder.

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Unclebaldrick said:

The odds of them being the same person are very high.

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CatHedral said:

Theres comfort in thinking that the constant stream of hard-right gadflies is really mostly bugeye and one or two other habitual malcontents.

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Killings in the United States jumped nearly 30 percent last year, according to FBI data released Monday that indicate a growing number of gun-related slayings amid the pandemic.

The FBI said murder and manslaughter rose 29.4 percent — the largest one-year increase since the federal government began compiling national figures in the 1960s. That historic increase has been known for some time and has sparked concern from police officials and prosecutors. But the FBI’s release of data compiled from thousands of law enforcement agencies formally confirms the trend.

Overall, violent crime rose 5.6 percent in 2020, while property crimes fell 7.8 percent, the FBI said. Assaults increased 12 percent, according to the bureau.

Criminologists and police officials have been studying possible explanations for the sudden, sharp increase in killings — from societal changes because of the coronavirus, to changes inpolicing, to increased gun sales. So far this year, officials are seeing a further increase in homicides but not as pronounced as last year.

The FBI data also shows how much killing in America is fueled by shootings. Guns accounted for 73 percent of homicides in 2019, but that increased to 76 percent of homicides in 2020. Houston saw a 55 percent increase in gun killings, which jumped from 221 in 2019 to 343 in 2020. Overall, the city saw more than 400 killings last year.

Two kids, a loaded gun, and the man who left a 4-year-old to die



Overall, however, crime is still well below the historic highs reached in the early 1990s. And in many cities, including Washington, D.C., New York and Chicago, the number of killings is still far below the record-high tolls from nearly 30 years ago.

“Homicides jumped almost everywhere, while overall crime was down, so there’s no real surprises in this,” said Justin Nix, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Nebraska in Omaha.

Nix said the most likely culprits for the sharp spike in killings are twofold: the pandemic and what he called a “police legitimacy crisis” brought on by the videotaped killing last year of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.

That incident and others have caused many people to trust police less, making them less willing to call for help or provide information to investigators about killings, Nix said. He added that the effect is magnified when officers “de-police” by pulling back from patrol and other duties in the face of public criticism.

On top of that, Nix said, the data suggests there may be more people carrying and using guns in public spaces, leading to more killings.

Biden administration targets illegal gun sales



Republican and Democratic elected officials disagree on what is causing the increase in homicides after years of decline, and how to stop it. Conservatives blame Democratic-run cities for what they say are overly restrictive policies placed on police departments; the Biden administration faults the easy availability of guns as a primary reason for more deaths, and the Justice Department is trying to stem the violence by cracking down on illegal gun trafficking.

The disturbing crime data comes as the FBI is pushing the nation’s roughly 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies to change how they provide information to calculate national figures and trends. The switch to the new crime data format, known as the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) has been a years-long process. But officials say 2020 is the last year for which data reported through the old system will be accepted.

Many law enforcement agencies don’t yet provide the FBI with the data that is needed for the new system, leaving some crime experts to predict that national crime figures will get more shaky in the short term, with markedly fewer jurisdictions included in the FBI summary that comes out each fall.

“It’s a little bit like cleaning out your garage — first you put a lot of stuff on the lawn, so it looks worse before it looks better,” said Mitch Beemer, who manages crime data for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which adopted a similar data-tracking program years earlier. “But I’m optimistic that we are moving in the right direction and will get most of the way there in five or six years.”

Nix, the criminologist, said when it comes to the FBI’s data, “I’m kind of worried about the future because I think we’re about to have a real blind spot for the next few years.”

Changes in crime rates have long fueled political debates over gun laws, and the newly released data is likely to intensify that trend. On Monday, gun control advocates said a large increase in first-time gun owners around the start of the pandemic likely played a significant role in rise in shooting deaths.

“We know having a gun in your home, having a gun in public, makes you less safe and more likely to be a victim and perpetrator of gun violence,” said Ari Davis, a policy analyst at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Davis said he was concerned about states that are repealing local gun control measures and passing “stand your ground” laws, which allow people to use deadly force in public — without a duty to retreat — if they are being attacked or threatened.

With more guns circulating in communities, Davis said, “that’s a dangerous mix. When we’re talking about community-based gun violence, that kind of violence can be retaliatory. If we don’t interrupt now, the spikes of today in gun violence can be hard to reduce even when the causes, like covid, are gone.”

But Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, said it was too early to tie the jump in gun sales to new owners to the rise in shooting deaths.

He noted police departments in 2020 saw personnel shortages because of the pandemic and adopted new rules at some agencies designed to curb abusive policing.

“Having an environment in which there are slightly fewer cops, with more out for covid and more of them not doing proactive things, that creates a place in which people might want to carry guns around, might be prone to do bad things with those guns,” Webster said.

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Federal prosecutors have requested that two members of The Base, a white-supremacist group, be sentenced as domestic terrorists after investigators accused them of planning to sow violence at the Virginia Capitol and assassinate the state’s speaker of the house.

On Thursday night, the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland filed a 45-page memo asking Judge Theodore Chuang to send the men to prison for 25 years each, followed by three years of supervised release — a punishment that factors in the government’s proposed terrorism enhancement.

“The defendants pose a severe risk to public safety,” federal prosecutors wrote. “They are domestic terrorists and should be sentenced accordingly.”

The men — Patrik Mathews and Brian Lemley Jr. — were arrested days before a gun rights rally in Virginia in January 2020. In announcing the charges, the Justice Department said the men planned to spark a “race war” at the event in Richmond.

Mathews, a Canadian national, and Lemley, of Elkton, Md., pleaded guilty to firearms and immigration-related charges in U.S. District Court in Maryland in June. At the time, federal prosecutors described the men's’ involvement in The Base, which organizes military-style training and supports racist and antisemitic violence, and the men acknowledged their participation in the group.

But prosecutors at the plea hearing did not discuss the gun rights rally or detail any allegations of the men’s plans before the event, laying out new accusations in the sentencing memo filed this week.

The rise of domestic extremism in America

The men discussed cutting power and transportation lines to the city, killing Black children and establishing a base camp in the Shenandoah Valley, according to transcripts included in the memo.

On Jan. 9, just weeks before the gathering, Mathews and Lemley discussed assassinating House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax), prosecutors said.

The men talked about obtaining the home address of Filler-Corn, the first Jewish and first woman speaker in the state, and placing a sniper outside, according to a transcript of the their conversation prosecutors included in the sentencing memo. But Mathews said that was “too high risk,” according to prosecutors, and Lemley commented that he doubted there was anywhere within 500 to 600 yards of her home where someone could sit and shoot.

The men then considered targeting Filler-Corn on her route to work, according to the transcript.

Their hope was to make the speaker a martyr for gun-control advocates, which would “probably accelerate their gun control agenda,” Mathews said, according to prosecutors. That would then, in their eyes, inspire their gun-rights comrades to become more enraged — and more violent.

Eventually, Mathews and Lemley decided to abandon the alleged assassination plan until they had a better sense of whether state lawmakers would pass the bills, prosecutors wrote.

Filler-Corn said in a statement Friday that she had only learned of the men’s plans on Thursday, the day the sentencing memo was submitted. She thanked law enforcement in Virginia and Maryland for investigating and prosecuting the case.

“This is extremely disturbing, and it should disturb all Americans,” she said. “This pattern of using violence to intimidate the leaders and symbols of our democracy undermines the core values of our democracy itself.”

Lemley’s federal public defender, Ned Smock said in a statement that the sentence prosecutors are recommending is “exponentially higher” than the 33 months he believes his client should receive.

Smock said a 25-year prison term is consistent with sentences imposed in cases involving death, not the 33 to 41 months outlined in sentencing guidelines for the crimes to which Lemley pleaded guilty.

Biden’s domestic terrorism strategy details unprecedented focus on homegrown threats

Smock also said Lemley has no criminal record and has never engaged in violence, and that prosecutors are basing their enhancement argument on “hundreds of hours of secretly monitored conversations” inside the apartment he shared with Mathews.

“Mark Lemley is a U.S. Army veteran who proudly served our country in Iraq,” Smock said. “He lost his way during a difficult time in his life and has accepted responsibility for the crimes he committed.”
An attorney for Mathews did not immediately return a request for comment.

Mathews, a former combat engineer in the Canadian army reserve, pleaded guilty to transporting a firearm and ammunition in interstate commerce with intent to commit a felony, and being an alien in possession of a firearm and ammunition. Lemley, who had served as an Army scout, pleaded guilty to similar charges, as well as with transporting and harboring an alien.

The men were also charged with obstruction of justice because they smashed their cellphones and dumped them into a toilet as federal agents were trying to arrest them.

Mathews and Lemley do not face domestic terrorism charges, however, because no federal statute dealing specifically with homegrown terrorism exists. Prosecutors often seek a terrorism “enhancement” during sentencing in such cases as a result.

Sentencing enhancements allow a judge to increase a person’s prison term. Prosecutors can ask for enhancements based upon how a crime was committed or who was victimized, but a judge ultimately decides whether an enhancement is appropriate based on a preponderance of the evidence.

In their memo, federal prosecutors wrote that the evidence is sufficient, including taped conversations in which the defendants “repeatedly confirmed … that their crimes were intended to promote enumerated federal crimes of terrorism.”

As Base members, Mathews, Lemley and a third man in the case, William G. Bilbrough IV, attended a training camp for the group in Georgia, prosecutors said. In late 2019 and early 2020, the men began assembling firearms and collecting thousands of rounds of ammunition, according to court documents.

Black, Brown and extremist: Across the far-right spectrum, people of color play a more visible role

According to federal prosecutors, Lemley and Mathews discussed further violence in additional conversations in mid-January ahead of the gun rights rally, some of which were witnessed by an undercover FBI agent.

The men said they expected 60,000 militia members to show up at the Virginia Capitol and that they were “rolling for chaos,” according to court documents.

Lemley allegedly told Mathews they “must act now.”

Mathews responded, according to prosecutors, by citing a late white-supremacist leader, then said: “We can’t fail where they have failed or else the White race is extinct.” They said they’d be ashamed if a “Battle of Richmond” took place and they weren’t involved.

“It’s just that we can’t live with ourselves if we don’t get somebody’s blood on our hands,” Lemley said, according to court documents.

The day before their arrest, according to the sentencing memo, the men also discussed the possibility they would be detained.

“Right now, if I ever get captured, I am going to jail for the rest of my life,” Mathews said. “You realize they’re just going to call us terrorists …”

He said they “might as well go to jail for something good.”

Mathews added: “Might as well do some damage to the system.”

On Jan. 16, 2020, federal agents arrested both men at a residence in Delaware.

Mathews and Lemley are scheduled to be sentenced at the end of October.

Bilbrough pleaded guilty to two counts of transporting an alien and was sentenced to five years in federal prison in December.

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