The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/tag/hate-crimes/)
Despite claims by law enforcement that people who are most susceptible to hate crimes are “hard to reach” populations, a UK study finds that victims would report incidents to officers if they didn’t feel barriers were insurmountable.
The state joins California in banning the use of a rare criminal defense that uses a victim’s sexual orientation as justification for a violent crime. Similar legislative measures will be introduced in other states in 2018.
After a year of attempting to quantify hate crimes in America, ProPublica says it has found a muddled and haphazard system for reporting the crimes that desperately needs a data makeover.
The federal agency’s tally of reported hate crimes reached a five-year high in 2016, with a significant bump in the last quarter of the year as Trump was unexpectedly swept into the White House.
While difficult to quantify as a trend, many educators note a spike in overtly racist actions by students, fueled by a polarizing presidential administration, divided public and a “meme culture.”
The Matthew Shepard Foundation is polling victims of hate crimes to learn why they don’t report the incidents to police. A small sample of replies so far suggests victims are confused about the definition of hate crimes, skeptical of law enforcement help, and fearful of retaliation.
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.
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.”
Kentucky’s “Blue Lives Matter” law makes it a hate crime to target police officers, a legislative trend sweeping a number of states. At the same time, lawmakers in New York, Connecticut and Illinois are responding to surging reports of hate crimes against racial, religious and ethnic minorities by trying to strengthen laws and policies that target criminal bias.
The nonprofit news organization says it is looking into reports of 250 incidents of “blatantly anti-Semitic activity in the real world – that doesn’t include online – in the three months after President Trump was elected.”