Introduction
Human society created a criminal justice system to protect the law-abiding citizens from those who choose to behave immorally and hurt people around them. However, in some cases, law enforcement officials may experience difficulties defining the type of the rules and guidelines’ violations. This paper describes general characteristics of ordinary and hate crime activities, as well as terrorism, and the main differences between them.
Ordinary Criminal Activities, Hate Crime, and Terrorism
Laws are official and documented rules accepted by society as norms that every member must follow. Lumen (n.d.) defines crime as behavior that deviates from the cultural standards or normal actions and may be dangerous for other people. To prosecute an ordinary criminal, law enforcement officials should compare one’s actions with those permitted in their jurisdiction area. They could do so based on personal observations or analyzing reports from other people. Strange behavior, such as breaking someone’s property and disturbing the public, is likely to be criminal.
In most cases, it would also be an offense against the state or public.
Hate crime includes violent acts with a chosen targeted victim for the reason of their social status (Lumen, n.d.). Examples of triggers for such actions are religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and gender identity. Law enforcement officials could focus their attention on the motives behind the crime and whether the offender could feel negative emotions toward the victim because they belonged to a particular social class.
Terrorists are criminals that usually follow an idealistic doctrine and may perform extreme actions, such a suicide bombing or mass shooting, to prove their point. Often, they follow religious, political, social, racial, or environmental theories that promote violence as an effective instrument to change social norms (FBI, n.d.). Law enforcement officials should search for irrationally fanatic actions performed by the criminal and their desire to hurt the public in the name of the perceived ideology.
Conclusion
While all of the described law violations are crimes, the ordinary one would not have a social class or ideological context. The law officials would have to consider the motivations and methods chosen by the person performing an illegal activity to define the type of a violation. Some crimes may include signs of several varieties of illicit activities, in which case the law should determine the course of action.
References
FBI. (n.d.). What we investigate: Terrorism. Web.
Lumen. (n.d.). Crime. Web.