Increase in unreported hate crime

According to a new federal report, nearly two-thirds of hate crimes go unreported in the country. The Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Department of Justice said that there was a 14 percent increase in 2003-06 of victims who did not report violent crimes, and an even bigger increase of 24 percent from 2007-11. It is believed that these crimes were not reported because victims felt that police could not help them.

 In the years 2003-2006, 46 percent of hate crimes were reported to the police. Now down by 11 percent, only 35 percent of hate crimes were reported in 2007-2011, according to the bureau.

“It’s shocking to see that much of an increase in the feeling of futility that hate crime victims are apparently experiencing,” Jason Marsden, the executive director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation, said in an interview. Shepard, a gay college student, was killed in a 1998 attack that police said was motivated in part by his sexual orientation. His parents started the foundation.

Blacks, Whites and Hispanics have reportedly had similar rates of hate crime victimization through the years 2007-2011. With the increase in violence that hate groups are prone to, it is possible that victims are becoming more fearful of reporting crimes.

“Violence accounted for 84 percent of the hate crimes during 2003-06, but rose to 92 percent during 2007-11. This comes as the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that it has identified more than 1,000 organized hate groups in each of the last three years, compared with 600 to 700 such groups in the period 2000-02,” Fox News Latino stated in a report.

Hate crime is a criminal offense defined by Congress as a motivated bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.

The National Crime Victimization Survey provides most of the data for the recent survey. They have been collecting information on crimes motivated by hate since 2003.

The Police Foundation’s President Jim Bueermann said there is an increased sensitivity on the part of police to the devastating nature of hate crime.

“I certainly saw that in my career,” said Bueermann, who spent 33 years as a Southern California police officer, 13 of them as a police chief.

“If those statistics are accurate, then police chiefs have to focus on the issue of why the members of their communities believe that the police aren’t willing to investigate,” Bueermann said. “I think this underscores the importance of police chiefs repeating these messages over and over and over” urging victims to report hate crimes.

An estimated annual average of 259,700 hate crimes against people age 12 or older occurred during 2007-11. The percentage of hate crimes motivated by religious bias more than doubled between 2003-06 and 2007-11 — from 10 percent to 21 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage motivated by racial bias dropped from 63 percent to 54 percent