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In 1990, Congress mandated that the FBI add reports of Hate Crimes to its Uniform Crime Reports. "The task has not been easy," says the Forward to the 1996 report. First came definitions and categorizations of hate-crime components. States and local jurisdictions have been legislating on the subject throughout this period, but not necessarily in conformity with the FBI's categories. Virginia, for example, classifies only misdemeanor assault, assault and battery, and trespass as offenses which may be subject to a "hate crime" label (see the note at the bottom of this piece). But the FBI Hate Crimes Report lists:
They also include a number of categories of crimes against property, such as vandalism, which may carry the Hate Crime label, and an occasional "Crime Against Society." Motivations are characterized as well: Race, Religion, Sexual Orientation, Ethnicity and (added in 1996) Disability. The reports include identification of the race of the perpetrator, where known. The FBI then had to "work ... to establish a nationwide system for collecting" hate crime data based on their categories. Reporting by local agencies is voluntary. Here's a table of total reported hate crimes, for the most recent five years for which information is available:
The University of Virginia reports both to the FBI and, since 1998 under terms of the Clery Act, to the U.S. Department of Education. Clery act reports do not include vandalism, but the FBI does, so instances of, for example, spraying a threatening message on a university wall will show up in the FBI stats but not in Clery. The University Police Clery reports show only one incident in the three years reported, a simple assault in 2000. The FBI reports also show two incidents in 1998. Captain Coleman of the University Police explains that one of these was an act of vandalism (the target of which was not clear), and the other an assault in which a racial epithet was used, but the target of the assault was clearly not a member of the group indicated. As an aside, in data provided recently by the City of Charlottesville Police Department, the numbers are somewhat lower than those shown here. Mike DelBiondo, in charge of keeping records for the Charlottesville PD, tells us that there are a couple of reasons for this. Some of it seems to be simple clerical error, now going back nearly 5 years. More interestingly, what were thought by investigating officers to qualify as bias-related incidents are now seen simply to not be. Reporting bias-related incidents was new that time. Officer enthusiasm combined with the lack of clear guidelines resulted in the reporting of anything that was remotely connected to one of the bias categories. For example, one of the incidents shown for 1998 to have been race-based involved two women, one white and one black, getting into a loud dispute over a parking space. Among many comments uttered to the investigating officer by both participants were some racially-charged words. Looking back, it is clear to DelBiondo that the incident report should not have had 'bias-related.' checked. The motive for the offense (the dispute) had nothing to do with bias (unless we make incompetent drivers a class to be given special victim status). You'll get an idea of the unreliability of the data presented in these reports (despite the highly specific numbers given) if you consider that in 1998, Charlottesville reported 21 hate crimes (including 18 race-based incidents) while for the same year Richmond, with approximately six times the population and no better reputation for civility, reported one incident. (And Albemarle County, 11.) Yet tub-thumpers on all sides point with alarm as they use these numbers to prove dearly-held convictions (and raise money). This results in a rather consistent, defensive tone in the introduction to each year's FBI report. In 2000, for instance, we are told that the data are presented "free of the nuances that many factions of society impose upon the subject." In the reports, the FBI refers to 'incidents,' and in their headings, to 'offenses.' An incident might involve multiple offenses. Each victim is counted as an offense. But "one offense is counted for each occurrence of crime against property and crime against society (their italics) regardless of the number of victims." How many of these offenses represent criminal charges having been being brought, and of those, how many result in convictions, is not reported. (Dave Sagarin, February 22, 2002) * UVa report not shown in FBI Hate Crimes Report for 1999 Why only misdemeanors in Virginia? According to Kent Willis, Director of the Virginia ACLU, “Hate Crimes laws are about penalty enhancement.” In Virginia, the intention of the statutes is to provide for a more severe penalty for offenses that would otherwise just not bring much punishment. The reason that the statutes do not cover felonies is that felonies provide sufficient scope and severity in sentencing already. In fact, says Willis, “the more minor the offense, the easier it
is to get the Hate Crime designation put on it.” (Dave Sagarin,
February 26, 2002)
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