One early February morning in 2009, Fayetteville police officers responded to reports of a fight at the Sunrise Cafe and found two men who had been hit in the face. Although many agencies and departments would only file zeros, federal guidelines call [Indianapolis Star report] for reports to be submitted. In Massachusetts, 63 agencies failed to file the reports during that time period. An FBI spokesman explained that during those years, the state department of public safety “had a policy in place that directed the agencies to submit their hate crime reports only if an incident had occurred”. Under a state law, they could lose funds for failing to file reports.
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The Associated Press identified nearly 2,800 city police and county sheriff’s departments across the country that have not submitted a single hate crime report for the FBI’s annual crime tally from 2009 to 2014.
State attorney general spokesman Joshua Wisch says the state is moving toward a new police reporting system that will involve sending hate crime reports to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The number of nonreporting departments represents about 17 percent of all city and county law enforcement agencies nationwide. March is typically the FBI’s deadline for data to be included in the prior year’s report.
Q: Should agencies file a report even if they did not investigate a suspected hate crime?
Many hate crimes may go unreported because there are no state laws defining or outlawing hate crime in Arkansas, said Mindy Bradley, a University of Arkansas at Fayetteville professor who studies the subject.
Bradley attributes the lack of state legislation on hate crimes to Arkansas’ political shift to the right and to a scarcity of high-profile crimes in the state. “But at this point we’ve just had none reported to us”, he said.
Ohio’s numbers fall in line with national statistics. Georgia does, however, require local police and sheriff’s agencies to report crime statistics.
The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr.
Last month, two Boston brothers who claimed to be inspired in part by Donald Trump’s views on immigrants were sentenced to state prison after pleading guilty to assault and hate crime charges for beating a homeless Mexican man because they thought he was an in the USA without legal documentation. Popejoy then leaned out the passenger window and continued to threaten the men, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release. So I’m going to know if we have a hate crime.
Marcel Cameo Tye, 25, had been shot in the head and dragged more than 100 feet underneath a vehicle.
Other cities with smaller populations like Columbus and Bloomington reported more – 4 and 10, respectively – than Fort Wayne, and Indianapolis led the state with 19 during that year. And in some cases, departments reported for, say, only one quarter of a year without submitting reports covering the rest of that span.
Q: How are federal hate crime cases handled?
“They were using the N-word”, he said. Officials at some like the Creve Coeur Police Department near Peoria say they do the reports when they can, but have only a handful of staff members.
But better documentation, she said, would still help inform Indiana’s debate over hate crime laws.
Many crimes that may have started because of bias are labeled as aggravated assault or murder because officers aren’t trained to recognize them as hate crimes or because the district attorney for a region chooses not to prosecute hate crimes, Potuk said. Since starting on the job in January there hasn’t been a hate crime in town, he said, adding that he didn’t think there would be a problem filing a report.
An analysis revealed that law enforcement reporting is spotty beyond those that never file. Numerous non-reporting departments are in small towns, which may only have one full-time police officer.
“Those are scrutinized very heavily by administration”, said Sgt. Craig Stout, an officer in the Fayetteville Police Department.
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Under FBI guidelines, an incident should be reported if a “reasonable and prudent” person would conclude a crime was motivated by bias.
