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President Biden, left, greets House Speaker Pelosi after signing the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act

Biden Signs Bill To Expand Hate Crime Data Collection

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

On May 20, President Joe Biden signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act into law. Beyond including provisions intended to combat the recent increase in bias-motivated violence against Asian Americans, the law also provides money to help states and local law enforcement agencies collect better, more comprehensive data on hate crimes.

As ProPublica reported in its series Documenting Hate, the lack of reliable information for quantifying and tracking hate crimes has left authorities without a complete understanding of the scope of such incidents or the tools needed to address them.

The FBI compiles national data on hate crimes, but it relies on local law enforcement to supply the underlying information. Reports of hate crimes can slip through the cracks at multiple stages in the process: Victims may not report to the police, the police may not classify reports correctly, and, in some cases, the state may simply fail to transmit the data to the FBI. In many jurisdictions, police aren't trained to understand what makes for a bias-motivated attack. There are wide disparities from agency to agency not only in what's reported but in how.

Nadia Aziz, the deputy director of the Arab American Institute, pointed to the deaths of Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer, which were prosecuted as hate crimes but were not included in the country's official count.

"They were both high-profile hate crimes. They were both charged as hate crimes," Aziz said. Their killers "were convicted on hate crimes charges. But they weren't reported" to the FBI as hate crimes.

The law Biden recently signed — which includes a section named after Jabara and Heyer — supplies grants to help state and local law enforcement agencies switch to a new reporting system that allows for the type of granular data collection needed to understand hate crimes. It also provides money to create state hotlines where people could report bias incidents if they preferred not to go to local police.

The act also provides additional grants for local law enforcement agencies to train officers about hate crimes or to establish new policies, units or reporting systems related to them.

Advocates acknowledge that the law stops short of requiring law enforcement agencies to report hate crimes to the FBI, but they say it's a step forward, especially because it requires agencies that receive grants to report their progress in tracking such crimes to their states, and for states to send those reports to the U.S. attorney general.

"I think it's just critical that this passed," said Dennis Shepard, who along with his wife, Judy, have been advocating for better hate crime laws since their son Matthew was beaten to death and tortured in 1998 because he was gay. "Nobody realized how important data collection would be when they first started doing this."

There are many failure points that can stop bias-motivated crimes from making their way to official reports, ProPublica found in its Documenting Hate reporting.

Law enforcement agencies covering populations of hundreds of thousands frequently say they have no hate crimes, or don't bother to report anything at all to the FBI. Hate crimes can be mislabeled, such as anti-LGBTQ crimes being reported as "anti-heterosexual." Police training on how to investigate and collect data on hate crimes is often inadequate and sometimes nonexistent.

The new law provides incentives for law enforcement to start addressing these flaws.

"It's so critical that they get the funding, and that they apply for it and use it properly," Shepard said.

Why America Fails At Gathering Hate Crime Statistics

Why America Fails At Gathering Hate Crime Statistics

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

In the early hours of June 5, 2015, Gary Bravo was leaving Sammy T’s in downtown Huntsville, Alabama. The club was hosting a gay night because the last of the city’s few gay bars had closed and some downtown bars were picking up the slack.

As Bravo walked out with two co-workers, they encountered a group of young men. One grabbed Bravo’s friend, and Bravo intervened. The next thing he remembers, someone spun him around, and he was on the ground being punched and kicked while his attackers shouted homophobic slurs. Faggot. Cocksucker.

“A couple more hits and I would have ended up being brain dead,” he recalled.

Bravo suffered extensive injuries from the attack. His right eye was bloodied and swollen, and he couldn’t see from it for weeks. His eye socket had to be reconstructed.

Despite his attackers’ words during the beating, police did not investigate it as a hate crime, or report it to state or federal authorities as one.

Bravo’s case is just one of thousands lost each year to a deeply flawed system for collecting hate crime data, one that has left the U.S. with unreliable, incomplete official counts and little handle on the true scope of bias-motivated violence.

Under a federal law passed in 1990, the FBI is required to track and tabulate crimes in which there was “manifest evidence of prejudice” against a host of protected groups, including homosexuals, regardless of differences in how state laws define who’s protected. The FBI, in turn, relies on local law enforcement agencies to collect and submit this data, but can’t compel them to do so.

The evidence suggests that many police agencies across the country are not working very hard to count hate crimes. Thousands of them opt not to participate in the FBI’s hate crime program at all. Among the 15,000 that do, some 88 percent reported they had no hate crimes. According to federal records, the Huntsville Police Department has never reported a hate crime.

Local law enforcement agencies reported a total of 6,121 hate crimes in 2016 to the FBI, but estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the federal government, pin the number of potential hate crimes at almost 250,000 a year — one indication of the inadequacy of the FBI’s data.

“The current statistics are a complete and utter joke,” said Roy Austin, former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division. Austin also worked at the White House on data and civil rights and helped develop an open data plan for police data.

It’s true that many hate crime cases fall away before they start because about half the victims never report them to authorities.

But to understand why so many cases that are reported to authorities still fall through the cracks, ProPublica requested incident reports or aggregate data from more than 350 law enforcement agencies in 48 states, including the 50 largest agencies nationwide, on the bias-motivated crimes they had investigated since 2010.

More than 280 agencies responded, but in many cases only to say they hadn’t investigated any such incidents, or had no records, or that their records were bad. When we followed up with agency public information officers, they acknowledged that investigators frequently did not mark down incidents as motivated by bias, even if there was evidence suggesting this was so — a spray-painted swastika, for example, might be classified simply as vandalism and not also as a hate crime.

The FBI and some larger agencies champion a two-tiered process in which incidents classified by the first responding officer as potentially bias-motivated are re-evaluated by a second investigator, who determines if the incident should be counted officially as a hate crime. Few of the agencies that responded to our records request appeared to follow this procedure.

In most states, local law enforcement agencies send their hate crime data to the state, which is then supposed to submit it to the FBI, but we found several instances in which this chain broke down. The Orlando Police Department, for example, told us it had reported five hate crimes for 2015 to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, but the FBI data shows no hate crimes investigated by Orlando that year. Orlando police say FDLE acknowledged the city’s data hadn’t been sent to the FBI “due to a system error,” but an FDLE spokesperson told ProPublica the Orlando police hadn’t submitted the information on time.

Variations in how states define hate crimes also cause confusion that contributes to the undercount. That appears to be one factor in what happened with the Huntsville case.

Alabama has a hate-crime statute, but it only applies to acts of bias based arising from “race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, or physical or mental disability,” not sexual orientation. A prosecutor on Bravo’s case acknowledged Bravo’s sexual orientation clearly played a role in his attack, but a spokesman for the Huntsville police said the assault couldn’t be reported as a hate crime because gay people aren’t protected under the state’s law.

The 1990 federal law, however, includes crimes against gay people among those it tracks and asks agencies to report such cases even if no hate crime charge was prosecuted.

Jack McDevitt, a longtime hate crimes researcher and the director of Northeastern’s Institute on Race and Justice, has reviewed police incident reports to check if investigators missed indicators that assaults or vandalism were actually hate crimes.

“We’ve found quite a bit of misclassification or missed cases that could have been investigated,” he said. “You’ve got police officers who aren’t trained to ask the right questions.”

It might not seem like being left out of the official hate crime count would rank high among Bravo’s concerns, but he said it did. Not being counted made him feel as though he and victims like him are being erased — and that there’s no accountability for the bias that motivates their attackers.

“If it happens to someone else, they’re going to be treated the same exact way, and it’s going to be unfair,” he said.

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Why People Don’t Report Hate Incidents

Why People Don’t Report Hate Incidents

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

It is one of the most striking and curious statistics contained in a recent Bureau of Justice Statistics report on hate crimes in America: 54 percent of the roughly 250,000 people who said they were victimized in recent years chose not to file a formal complaint with the authorities.

The Matthew Shepard Foundation, an advocacy organization based in Colorado that played a role in successfully pushing for national hate crime legislation, has recently tried to better understand the phenomenon. The foundation began asking the Denver residents notifying the organization about being victimized to explain why they did or did not report the incident to the police.

The effort began in February and so far has produced a modest 15 responses — not all of which appear to be crimes. But in a country largely bereft of reliable or probing data on hate crimes, the information collected by the foundation has value.

The foundation, which shared its data as part of our Documenting Hate project, agreed to make public some of the responses to the question on reporting to authorities. The responses are anonymous, but they offer glimpses into the mix of forces at work when victims are deciding what to do: confusion about the definition of hate crimes; skepticism of the commitment by law enforcement to aggressively investigate; fear of retaliation.

“They echo what other organizations have heard through listening sessions, meetings, and the national victims of crime survey responses,” said Jason Marsden, the foundation’s executive director, referencing the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ report.

For one transgender person who reported that homophobic slurs and beer cans were hurled at them, the answer to why they reported the assault to the police was clear: “To get these men charged with a crime.”

For others, there was confusion as to whether what happened to them was worth reporting to the police.

One of the responses came from a gay woman who had felt menaced by a drunk man, who screamed at her: “You fucking dykes are all going to hell.” The woman said her main concern was to flee the scene as quickly as possible.

She said it was also far from clear to her that the menacing amounted to a crime, “since it was just mean words.” It would take a real investigation to answer her uncertainty, but it’s quite likely the incident didn’t qualify as a prosecutable crime.

A Hispanic woman walking through her neighborhood wrote that she felt sexually harassed by passengers in a passing car.

“Working or walking?” she said they asked her. She didn’t call the cops.

“It is just expected that women have to deal with this and it is a fact of our lives,” she wrote. “On a more logistical level,” she added, “I did not get the license plate number.”

A gay woman with short hair reported that another woman tried to bar her from entering the women’s room at a McDonald’s, believing she was transgender.

It was “pointless to report,” she said, though she added she had to physically move the woman from her path.

A number of the respondents did call the police, to mixed effect.

A gay, black man at a rally against President Trump’s travel ban said a passenger in a passing vehicle threw an egg at his face. When he contacted the Denver Police Department, “the dispatcher seemed unsympathetic,” he reported. “No police officer came to my assistance, although I felt I was in distress.”

Another gay man said he was followed around a store by an angry man who yelled homophobic slurs at him. “I refuse to allow anyone to attack me like this, so I reported it,” he wrote. He went on to say, without further explanation, that when it was all over, he wound up being ticketed by the police for “disturbing the peace.”

A disabled lesbian woman in the city’s suburbs said a neighbor tried to run her down with his car. She said she wanted to call the police, but that she was afraid.

“I often think I will not be believed or taken seriously,” she wrote. When she called the police anyway, she asked the officers not to confront the man, fearing retaliation for filing a report.

“I knew that reporting the incident was important — both to notify authorities to have the incident documented, to have evidence of harassment on file in the event of a future incident, and because no matter who I am or what my sexuality is, I knew this was wrong and potentially criminal,” she wrote.

When a recently disabled gay man said he was attacked by another man who’d asked for bus fare, he said he was prevented from calling the police by his assailant. “Faggot, you calling the police,” the man reportedly said as he punched the victim. Luckily, he wrote, someone else called the authorities for him. He thought the cops were great.

“They were very compassionate,” he wrote, adding that the officers offered to have a victim advocate talk with him, and came back later to check on him.

In all, most of the people surveyed did not report incidents to the police.

“My take on the results mostly is that people are not reporting because they just don’t think the police are going to take it seriously enough, or they don’t think the incident went to that level,” said Stephen Griffin, who the foundation contracted with to implement the survey.

Christine Downs, a spokesperson for the Denver Police Department, said by email that even if a person doesn’t believe what happened to them was a crime, they should report the incident to the police.

“The Denver Police Department strongly encourages all residents to report crime, regardless of how insignificant they may think it is, especially bias-motivated crimes,” she said.

Marsden, the Matthew Shepard Foundation’s executive director, plans to try to expand their survey to other cities to keep learning more about why people don’t report incidents of hate, and to take what they learn to the police officers they work with.

“I think that can help keep people safe and help on the prevention side of things,” he said. “You have to be an optimist in this line of work.”

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