...When you hit somebody over the head but actually don't like them(?) (sorry...)

Generally, the perpetrator does not hate the victim. Obviously, the perpetrator has no regard for the victim: criminals do not consider the victim at all. They are concerned only with their own goals. Largely, those are immediate goals, range of the moment. Shoplifting and other white collar crimes are somewhat different from that in that they are planned. White collar criminals (including shoplifters) are planfully competent actors who calculate their gains and risks. But they do not hate their victims.

Prejudice is offered as an excuse or justification. (Those are different, offered by different kinds of criminals.) But with criminals, we have a basic problem in their own almost complete lack of self-awareness. They are not thinkers. If they were thinking, they would not be criminals. But they do have mental processes, even as they are largely unaware of whatever is going on "inside."

And it is not just them. Any pollster will tell you that people say what they think someone else wants to hear. Working in real estate, I learned the saw: "Buyers are liars."

Perhaps the largest lacuna in the law is ignoring the fact that rape is a hate crime. See my comments in the discussion on Hip Hop:
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
and
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
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Just for reference on topic:
The Hate Crime Statistics Act (28 U.S.C. § 534) defines hate crimes as “crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, gender or gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.” The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) measures crimes perceived by victims to be motivated by an offender’s bias against them for belonging to or being associated with a group largely identified by these characteristics. For a crime to be classified as a hate crime in the NCVS, the victim must report at least one of three types of evidence that the act was motivated by hate: the offender used hate language, the offender left behind hate symbols, or police investigators confirmed that the incident was hate crime. Bureau of Justice Statistics here: http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&ti...

The FBI agrees: https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/civil...