The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/hate-crimes/)
Attorney General Jeff Sessions made an overture to some of his most fervid critics, inviting civil rights leaders to a hate-crimes summit and emphasizing his support for prosecuting anti-transgender and anti-Muslim crime.
U.S. residents experienced an average 250,000 hate crime victimizations annually between 2004 and 2015, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported today. Between 2011-2015, some 54 percent of the cases were handled privately, through non-law enforcement, or were not considered important enough to report officially.
Scores of federal law enforcement agencies are ignoring a longstanding legal mandate to submit statistics to the FBI’s national hate crimes database, calling into question the veracity of what is supposed to be the nation’s most comprehensive source of information on hate crimes.
The Portland train attack suspect, Jeremy Joseph Christian, 35, fits no obvious mold in the white-supremacist world. Hate-crime experts tell the New York Times that “More open hate speech in politics, street demonstrations and social media loosens the floodgates for people exposed to it, diminishing the sense of impropriety or social taboo.”
The killings of two men on a light-rail train are “something we really haven’t seen here,” says a police spokesman. The mayor fears that a planned right-wing rally will become violent. The ACLU says the event should go on.
A white University of Maryland student is accused of fatally stabbing a black Bowie State University student just before his graduation. The suspect’s attorney says “alcohol and substance abuse may have played a significant role in all of this.”
Joshua Vallum of Mississippi was the first person prosecuted under the Hate Crimes Prevention Act for targeting a victim because of gender identity. He got a 49-year prison term on top of a life sentence in a state court.
The San Francisco-based tech firm is the go-to internet network vendor for the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer and other white supremacist groups. The company’s CEO has said Cloudfare has no “affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.”
At least six states are considering new laws to tamp down the wave of hate that has washed over the country since the caustic presidential election. One expert says some Americans “are reverting back to a kind of tribalism and acting out with hate crimes or acts of uncivilized bigotry.”
Kori Muhammad, 39, is due in court today on charges of killing three men because they were white. He told detectives “he did not like white men,” said Police Chief Jerry Dyer.