HATE IN AMERICA
Many victims don’t report crimes, and authorities don’t always see bias
Many victims of hate crimes are reluctant to report them, and even when they do, the crimes do not always lead to arrests, a News21 analysis of the federal National Crime Victimization Survey shows. ❚ More than 2.4 million crimes in which victims suspected hate as a motivating factor were committed across the USA from 2012 to 2016, the survey found. Tens of thousands of Americans are interviewed annually for the survey.
Two-thirds of the respondents who suspected they were targeted because of hate were unable to cite tangible evidence, such as hate speech, that could be used by law enforcement. Authorities could confirm only 2.5 percent of the reported crimes were motivated by hate.
“It’s important to look at the number of people who suspect they were a victim of a hate crime and not just the FBI data. People’s perception is their reality,” said attorney Roy Austin, a former deputy assistant attorney general of the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division. “A lot of these law enforcement agencies don’t believe that they have a problem with hate crimes. If they don’t think they have a problem, they won’t deal with it well.”
What the victimization survey found has not been reflected in the
FBI’s national hate crime data. In the same five-year period ending in 2016, the FBI counted 30,000 hate crimes reported to them by police. Only 12 percent of police departments reported any hate crimes at all to the FBI.
Jack McDevitt, director of Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice, said victimization survey data are important in determining victims’ perceptions of hate crimes at a time of cultural and political upheaval.
“Groups such as black Americans and the LGBTQ community have historically and consistently been targeted by hate crimes. However, external events and politics can change attitudes towards certain groups,” McDevitt said. “Whenever controversial things happen, it empowers the haters to go ahead and act out because they believe people share their bias.”
Over the past year, 38
News21 journalists reported from 36 states, which included a 7,000mile road trip around the country to assess the state of hate in America.
Many victims of hate crimes are reluctant to report them to the police. And reported crimes do not always lead to arrests, prosecutions or even a record of hate crimes.
News21 found that Latinos and immigrants don’t report hate crimes to law enforcement because of the threat of deportation, among other reasons.
“We’re told not to draw any unnecessary attention to ourselves. Even if you get robbed or exploited or you’re in danger, you just don’t want that unnecessary attention,” said Pricila Garcia, 20, of Cleburne, Texas, the daughter of Mexican immigrants.
LGBTQ people also hesitate to report hate crimes because of a chronic distrust between the community and the police. Their cases usually aren’t prosecuted as hate crimes when they are reported, victims said.
Brandon Ballone, a drag performer, was a victim of a violent crime during a night out in New York in 2016. The
27-year-old was wearing a T-shirt advertising his drag-queen personality when a group of teenagers beat him with a glass bottle, leaving him with a severed tendon in his hand, a torn ear and damaged jaw.
Ballone said shock and his impulse to get to safety left him unable to recall whether his attackers used homophobic slurs or called him names. As a result, police didn’t investigate his case as a hate crime.
“Anybody who attacks someone in that kind of way, it seems to me that there is a lot of hate there,” Ballone said. “But apparently, a hate crime, to (the police), means I would have had to hear them say the word ‘faggot.’ ”
Hate crime laws are not consistent across the U.S. Forty-five states have statutes criminalizing various types of bias-motivated violence or intimidation. Hate crime laws in
14 of those states do not include either sexual orientation or gender identity. Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana and Wyoming have no hate crime laws at all.
In May, Sonya King, a black Muslim woman, was delivering food in Atlanta when her first customer of the day grabbed her head covering, pulled her inside his home and began to choke her with it.
“That was some real hateful stuff,” King said. “Every time when I told that man ‘I got children,’ he pulled harder.”
Advocacy groups called the attack a hate crime, saying the man targeted King for her race and religion, but Georgia has no hate crime laws. The case is ongoing.
Just 100 hate crimes were prosecuted as federal crimes from January 2010 to July 2018, according to a News21 analysis. Half involved racially motivated violence against black Americans.
Hate groups have increasingly used social media to recruit members. Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group, goes beyond social media and actively recruits on college campuses, distributing recruitment flyers, stickers and posters. Its leaders said they see colleges as the “last battleground.”
“Generally, the idea is that people see the flier and then they look us up online,” said Patrick Casey, Identity Evropa’s executive director.
Hate groups’ visibility reached global attention at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists – protesting plans to remove a Confederate statue – chanted such slogans as “White lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us” at a rally at the University of Virginia. The protests ended in violent clashes with counterprotesters.
One woman, Heather Heyer, was killed after police said James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio rammed his car into a group of demonstrators.
“People were screaming, you could hear the sounds of thud, thud, thud, but nobody knew what it (the car) was,” said Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro. “And I have a picture that was taken a split second (earlier) by a photographer with Heather looking right at the guy before he hits her.”
Jason Kessler, organizer of the Charlottesville rally, said he believes white people are not given fair treatment in the United States.
“We are fastly becoming a minority in the country we founded, and we’re still not able to have the same rights of assembly and organization that other groups are,” he said.
Randy Gamble, who works with the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, Tennessee, an organization that advocates for racial justice and healing, said a lot of tensions came to the forefront in Charlottesville, but he remains hopeful.
“We’re dealing with a lot of things from the past that came to the surface,” he said. “People don’t just forget about what happened. Violence happened, and that doesn’t go away. We don’t want to repeat that history all over again. We want to change the tapestry of this country in a way that frees people from the wounds.”
“Whenever controversial things happen, it empowers the haters.” Jack McDevitt Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice