The limitations of the US legal approach to define and record hate crimes

Check out this new article by Jeannine Bell in The Conversation, where the author discusses the narrow legal definition of hate crime adopted in the US. A hate crime is a crime that is motivated by bias; however, the bias motivation can be hard to prove, and prosecutors are often reluctant to take cases that that they may not win in court.

The article discusses the first use of the term “hate crime” in federal legislation, which was in the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990. This was a data-gathering requirement that mandated that the US attorney general collect data on crimes that “evidenced prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.”  However, although 47 states have hate crime laws, 86.1% of law enforcement agencies reported to the FBI that not a single hate crime had occurred in their jurisdiction in 2019. The FBI’s 2019 report contains 8,559 bias crimes reported by law enforcement agencies. But in the National Crime Victimization Survey, victims say that they experienced, on average, more than 200,000 hate crimes each year.

Why are US law enforcement agencies missing so many hate crimes? The two main reasons are under-reporting (i.e., victims and witnesses do not report hate crimes to police for a variety of reasons) and lack of training and skills to correctly identify a hate crime among police. You can read the full article here.