According to an Associated Press investigation, almost 30 percent of police agencies in West Virginia failed to report hate crime statistics to the FBI from 2009-2014.
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While Fort Wayne police have reported the number of hate crimes investigated every year during the six-year span analyzed by the Associated Press – there were two in 2014, the latest year available – others such as the Allen County, DeKalb County, Noble County and Whitley County sheriff’s departments as well as police departments in Bluffton, Huntington and Woodburn are pegged as ones failing to report statistics in one or multiple years. A family thinking about moving to the northern Utah city has a right to have public access to crime statistics, said Soffe, who previously worked for police agencies in the Salt Lake City area.
That was the fewest total hate crimes reported since 2009, and it was well below the five-year average.
With spotty reporting across the nation, advocates worry that the lack of a comprehensive, annual accounting disguises the extent of bias crimes – which already tend to be underreported – at a time of heightened racial, religious and ethnic tensions.
But Wiley said there could be some confusion among departments about what to report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including whether they should file data even if they had no hate crimes to report in a given year.
A review of crimes in NY, for instance, showed a particular hate crime that had been committed but not reported to the FBI, AP State Government Editor Tom Verdin said.
That makes Arkansas the state with the ninth-lowest reporting record, according to the AP data. The state’s most recent report includes two hate crimes in 2015, both on Kauai involving anti-Caucasian epithets. Other changes have allowed for better tracking of departments that aren’t submitting bias crime reports, but the impact of those changes won’t be known until early 2017, he said.
Reasons vary. Several agencies thought they had submitted the information, while others were unsure they had to report because they said they had not had any hate crimes in their jurisdiction.
The FBI defines a hate crime as any offense committed because of bias related to a person’s race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.
Gwinnett County Sheriff’s said it was covered by the county police and didn’t have to submit the reports, although the Gwinnett County Police did not submit reports between 2009 and 2013 either. Instead, victims of hate crimes rely on the FBI to investigate and bring charges.
Arkansas saw the first person convicted under this act in 2011 when a Green Forest man pleaded guilty to one count of committing a federal hate crime and one count of conspiring to commit a federal hate crime.
Sgt. Gary Gross, spokesman for the Lakeland Police Department, said he is surprised some agencies don’t report their numbers.
“Nobody is holding the law enforcement agencies accountable if that data does not come forward”, Sklar said.
IN is one of only five states that do not have a statute that allows local prosecutors to charge someone with a hate crime. He didn’t explain why his office hasn’t sent in a report with zeros.
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The burden of proof is high for such crimes, said Lt. Steve McClanahan, public information officer for the Little Rock Police Department.
