More than half of Indiana’s police agencies failed to file hate crime reports with the Federal Bureau of Investigation between 2009 and 2014, a trend advocates say is a reason why IN needs to pass a hate crimes law. But several MA law enforcement agencies that have not submitted reports for at least the past six years said the Federal Bureau of Investigation has not communicated that to them.
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Some of the non-reporting agencies say they thought they were reporting, while others thought they didn’t have to file.
There has been only one incident in the six years in question that was debated as a hate crime because the people involved were yelling derogatory names at one another, Sisemore said.
In New Mexico, small town police departments in some of the most rural areas of the state are among those that haven’t submitted the voluntary reports.
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.
Now, the FBI office in Little Rock is joining a national effort to encourage more reporting by reaching out to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, said Deb Green, a public affairs specialist for the FBI office in Arkansas.
“Nobody is holding the law enforcement agencies accountable if that data does not come forward”, Sklar said.
“We need the reporting to happen”, said the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached.
Bobby Hilton and Jordan Morris had been sitting in the diner with four friends when four men sitting to their left began “giving them trouble”, making comments about their sexuality, according to a police report.
Under FBI guidelines, an incident should be reported if a “reasonable and prudent” person would conclude a crime was motivated by bias.
“We’ve actually had none to report, which gave us the option of whether or not to file it, but even with zero reportage the records clerk said she did submit one every year”, said spokesman Bob Harmon about missing years 2009 and 2011. “There are all kinds of hate crimes that go unreported because there’s no mechanism for reporting them”.
The statistics analyzed by the AP revealed wide disparities in how seriously states take the reporting.
“The FBI reports are not a litmus test of whether hate crimes are occurring in a particular jurisdiction”, Bell said. Hate crime reports aid [AP report] the Department of Justice (DOJ), journalists and researchers in tracking hate crime patterns nationwide.
MS law is similar but does not include gender identity.
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Some states clearly made reporting a priority, however. For example, almost all the roughly 350 local law enforcement agencies in Tennessee routinely filed. Under a state law, they could lose funds for failing to file reports.
