During spread of hate crimes, lawmakers seek harsher penalties

The anonymous email arrived on a Saturday afternoon. Its hateful message was directed at African-Americans, Mexicans and Muslims in general.

Three words stood out: “run or die.”

About 10 miles away, the telephones on the campus of the Levite Jewish Community Center rang four times in six weeks with bomb threats.

The interfaith threats were enough to prompt the introduction of a bill in the Legislature expanding Alabama’s hate crime law to include threats against religious institutions and schools.

A wave of hateful episodes have been reported across the country in recent months: threatening calls and notes, physical assaults and confrontations, and deadly shootings. The response in at least a half-dozen states has been anti-hate legislation aimed at beefing up penalties and expanding definitions of what constitutes hate.

The legal definition of bias-motivated crimes varies from state to state, with the same acts bringing vastly different punishments depending on where they occur. Five states do not have any anti-hate statutes: Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, Wyoming and Indiana, where a bill failed again this year.

A patchwork of state and federal laws, along with underreporting, means it is unclear how often hate crimes occur.

The FBI’s latest report, released in November, showed a 6.7 percent rise in reported hate crimes in 2015. But the federal tracking system relies on police departments to voluntarily submit such crimes to the FBI.