Crimes That Have Special Motives?

I am mostly in the camp that says adding the motivation of a crime as additional crime is a little, uhm, problematic: is beating someone up because they are gay worse than beating someone up because they took your parking spot, or they didn't put the fries in your order, if you are already committing a crime and getting charged with it, like assault?

Twitter put this in my timeline (through the miracle of retweeting, it's how I see the Pres's tweets fairly often without following him whether I wanted to or not): 

So, if you want to find the tweet, and the thread, that's fine, but I think that this was the only one of the thread that used actual numbers in addition to the percents of change.

I point that out for two reasons: using percent of change always makes things more dramatic, and that the actual number is ridiculously small. I've done the math on the alphabet people's actual numbers.

With Gallup reporting that according to their research

Overall, 4.3% of U.S. adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, according to Gallup's latest estimate from its June 2016-June 2017 tracking data. That is up from 3.9% a year ago and 3.4% in Gallup's initial estimate in 2012. 

I find it interesting that it's still a tiny percentage of the population that was affected by this massive media story (although it's still a largish actual number: 2015 census says 247,773,709 adults, so that's like 10.6 million people), and the subset of that number that got married in light of the Supreme Court decision is pretty small. Let's do some math.

Using the 2015 number above, and that 4.3% percentage according to Gallup, there are approximately

• 10,654,269 adult LGBT people in the US.
• 841,687 married prior to HodgesObergefell (7.9%)
• 1,086,735 married after two years (10.2%)
• so 245,048 adults got married as a result, so far. (this is off by a little, as we are using 2015 numbers, I get that.)

That's .000989% of the adults in the US. 

That doesn't break out trans people, so let's do that.  Therefore, the 46% increase of 49 crimes among the 1.4+ million individuals is really not that big, is it? Yes, any increase is a bad thing, but using the change percentage so you can call it a 46% increase is alarmist.

BTW, if you did dive into the link at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) you will see that compared to the total number of crimes (and in relation to the important number of adults in the US, just under 250 million), hate crimes are actually pretty rare. This is good. Here's info from the FBI's site.

In 2018, there were 364,800 violent crime incidents, and 419,724 offenses reported by the United States by 7,610 law enforcement agencies that submitted  data.