Pa. overdue for better prosecution of hate crimes

In 2016, a 14-year-old white high school student in Northampton County targeted a 16-year-old black youth for harassment in a racist video. He called him a racial slur, made racist references to Kentucky Fried Chicken and welfare, and shared the result of

Sounds like a hate crime, right?

But local law enforcement didn’t think so. It overlooked the hate component of this awful instance of bullying and cyber-harassment.

It fell to the black youth’s attorney to make the case that the offense involved ethnic intimidation. His successful argument prompted the county prosecutor to authorize a hate crime charge in the case.

But as Penn Live’s Ivey DeJesus reported last week, that’s an all-too-common occurrence.

Police logs across Pennsylvania are filled with scores of incidents in which a bias against someone’s race, ethnicity or religion are noted in a crime report. But, for reasons that range from the failure to file hate crime charges or those charges becoming a bargaining chip in plea negotiations, they seldom result in convictions.

That means they stay out of state crime statistics. And that, in turn, means Pennsylvania, a state of 12.7 million, continues to have a chronically low annual reporting rate of hate crimes to the FBI.

“Absolutely the numbers should be higher,” Sgt. William Slaton, who oversees hate crimes for the Pennsylvania State Police, told Penn Live.

According to those on the ground, two factors appear to be driving the under-reporting of hate crimes in the state.

1. A lack of training? Technology or both?

As DeJesus notes, the FBI’s hate-crimes statistics are based on reports submitted by the state police, which take the data from information gleaned from law enforcement agencies across the state.

While departments routinely respond to incidents that are booked as hate crimes, at some point between the initial arrest and court disposition the hatecrime charges are dropped.

Officials cite a number of reasons for that. As DeJesus notes, prosecutors are sometimes willing to drop a hate crimes charge. Other observers point to police attitudes, arguing that local police departments fail to recognize when hate crimes occur or to identify them that way.

The State Police say the agency is now investigating whether the problem is one of training, one of technology, or a combination of the two.

According to Slaton, the State Police are updating their record management system and implementing a new statewide system for police agencies to report crime. That should take care of the technological side of things.

More stubborn is the problem of underreporting by local law enforcement agencies. Of the 1,463 law enforcement agencies across the state that submitted numbers on crimes last year, only 20 submitted hate crime incidents reports.

There’s only one way to increase sensitivity, and it’s much the same as repeated practice leads one to play Carnegie Hall: Through training, training, training. Local police agencies must be trained to recognize hate crimes in their communities and how to confront them. 2. A weakness in state law. The issue there, according to Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo, is the narrow definition of the ethnic intimidation statute.

“We have to prove that the person acted with criminal intent because of malice toward a specific racial, ethnic or religious group,” Chardo told Penn Live. “There are some hurdles that have been placed. It could have been drafted more precisely.”

That means state lawmakers need to go back to the drawing board to craft a law that closes any loopholes and gets to the heart of the under-reporting issue. Unfortunately, the Legislature doesn’t have the greatest track record in this regard.

Efforts in the Legislature to expand the language of the law — and protected classes — have failed over the years. The most recent reform was overturned by the courts on procedural grounds.

Since then, efforts to expand protection under the law have failed both in the House and Senate. Crimes motivated by political orientation, gender or sexual orientation bias are not protected under the ethnic intimidation statute.

Pennsylvania is one of 15 states that offer no LGBT inclusion under hate crimes law. That’s inexcusable in a state that prides itself as being the cradle of American liberty.

Equal protection under the law means equal protection — for everyone. As last year’s riots in Charlottesville and elsewhere made clear, hate is alive and well in America. If we fail to prosecute it and confront it, it’s at our eternal peril.