Groups fear hate crimes in Texas go unreported

Hate and bias-related crimes rose for the second straight year in 2016, raising concerns about divisions nationally even as groups that monitor such activity questioned whether law-enforcement agencies in Texas and elsewhere are under-reporting crimes based on race, religion and other factors.

Law enforcement departments across the country reported 6,121 criminal incidents last year, according to FBI statistics released Monday. That compares to 5,818 such crimes reported in 2015. More than 70 percent of the incidents stemmed from bias based on race or religion, the FBI said.

Texas reported 178 bias-related crimes across the Lone Star State, down from 191 the previous year.

In contrast, Massachusetts, which has a quarter of the population of Texas, recorded 391 hate crimes last year.

“We believe Texas is one of those states that has a significant issue of under-reporting,” said Brian Levin, of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Levin noted that last year, the Houston Police Department recorded just eight hate crimes, down from a high of 25 in 2015. “It’s highly unlikely the major cities in Texas are reporting the bulk of hate crimes that actually occur,” he said.

From 2010 to 2016, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office reported four hate- or

bias-related crimes, according to HCSO data. During that same time period, HPD reported 113 hate crimes in the Bayou City.

Across the country, at least 90 cities with more than 100,000 residents appear to have reported zero hate crimes or ignored the FBI request for 2016 hatecrime data. They include the Texas cities of Pasadena, Pearland, Killeen, McAllen, Richardson, and several others.

Officials from the Harris County Sheriff ’s Office and the Houston Police Department did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

‘Snapshot of hate’

The FBI figures show an uptick in incidents against Jewish people, Muslims and the LGBT community.

Law enforcement agencies recorded 7,615 hate crimes overall, according to the data, with 4,720 against people and 2,813 against property. An additional 82 were categorized as “crimes against society,” according to the report.

The report provides an “important snapshot of hate” in the United States, according to Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, a civil-rights group that monitors hate groups.

“It’s deeply disturbing to see hate crimes increase for the second year in a row,” Greenblatt said. “Hate crimes demand priority attention because of their special impact. They not only hurt one victim, but they also intimidate and isolate a victim’s whole community and weaken the bonds of our society.”

Greenblatt and leaders of other groups that monitor hate crimes said the FBI data likely under-reports hate- or bias-related crimes because it relies on voluntary submissions from law enforcement departments that don’t often classify such crimes.

“There’s a dangerous disconnect between the rising problem of hate crimes and the lack of credible data being reported,” Greenblatt said. “Police departments that do not report credible data to the FBI risk sending the message that this is not a priority issue for them, which may threaten community trust in their ability and readiness to address hate violence.”

A report released earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Justice estimated that from 2004 to 2015, approximately 250,000 hate crime victimizations occurred annually, the majority of which were not reported to police.

The increase in hate crimes in both 2015 and 2016 represents the first back-to-back rise since 2004, experts said, but the 2016 number remains approximately 20 percent lower than the highest number of reported crimes in recent history, which was in 2006.

Toxic rhetoric blamed

Levin attributed the increase in hate crimes over the last year to a spike in such incidents after President Donald Trump’s election; a rise in hate crimes in large cities; and more hate crimes being committed against Jews, Latinos, Arabs, transgender people, whites, and Muslims.

The Southern Poverty Law Center found a 25 percent rise in such incidents during the final three months of 2016.

Richard Cohen, the center’s president, said the FBI figures show that the nation’s most vulnerable resi- dents were paying the price for the toxic rhetoric of the 2016 election.

“The words of our political leaders have consequences,” Cohen said Monday. “President Trump has energized the radical right with his xenophobic rhetoric and has given bigots a license to act on their worst instincts.”

Emboldened white supremacists have held rallies that have turned violent.

A woman protesting a pro-Confederacy rally in Charlottesville, Va., was killed when a white supremacist drove into a gathering of counter-protesters. Trump was sharply criticized for blaming both sides for the violence, suggesting a moral equivalency between the white supremacists and those who opposed them.

Three Houston-area men face charges of attempted homicide in Florida after authorities say one

them fired a gun from a car at a group of bystanders following a white supremacist’s speech on the University of Florida campus last month.

Operating online

According to the SPLC, 917 hate groups were operating in the U.S. in 2016, up from 892 the previous year. The number of anti-Muslim groups nearly tripled, from 34 to 101.

“The numbers undoubtedly understate the real level of organized hatred in America,” the SPLC noted in a report earlier this year. “In recent years, growing numbers of right-wing extremists operate mainly in cyberspace until, in some cases, they take action in the real world.”

Groups that track such activity say the numbers of hate incidents continue to rise. For the first nine months of this year, the ADL identified 1,299 instances of anti-Semitism across the U.S. including physical assaults, vandalism,

and attacks on Jewish institutions — two-thirds more than occurred during the same period in 2016.

In the group’s Southwest Region — which includes Houston and southern Texas, from El Paso to Orange — the numbers nearly tripled, from 12 instances of anti-Semitism in 2016 to 35 in 2017, according to the ADL.

Levin said that because the hate crime report only tracked actual reported crimes, it likely failed to capture the scope of the problem.

“While we saw a moderate increase nationally in hate crime, I think if we were able somehow to gauge hate incidents, we would probably see a greater increase,” he said.

Pro Publica’s Ken Schwencke contributed to this report, which is part of “Documenting Hate,” a collaboration with Pro Publica tracking bigotry and hate crimes across the U.S.