Hate Crimes

Hate crimes are defined as those criminal acts in which the perpetrator was motivated by bias against the victim based on the victim's religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. Criminal acts motivated by hatred are not new: the Romans persecuted Christians, the Nazis committed crimes primarily against Jews but also against Gypsies and other religious or ethnic minorities, and acts against African Americans due solely to their skin color have been a common occurrence in the United States from colonial times and continue, to a far lesser extent, to the present.

A resurgent interest in bias-motivated crimes began in the 1980s. After the sensationalized murder of a controversial radio talk show host, Alan Berg, in Denver, Colorado, in 1984, which exposed the prevalence of white supremacist groups, and the unprovoked 1986 attack on three African Americans in the white New York City neighborhood of Howard Beach, hate crimes, once again, captured national attention.

In 1990, Congress enacted the Hate Crimes Statistic Act. It provided that the U.S. attorney general should collect data from state and local law enforcement about bias-motivated crimes. The act defined hate crimes as those “crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, including where appropriate the crimes murder, non-negligent manslaughter,[Page 699] forcible rape, aggravated assault, simple assault, intimidation, arson, and destruction, damage or vandalism of property.” Initially, fewer than 20% of the states had mechanisms in place to track which criminal acts were motivated by hate. With the advent of the National Incident Based Reporting System in the mid-1990s, however, by 1998 most states were reporting bias crimes to the federal government.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has served as the central repository of hate crime statistical information. The agency's Criminal Justice Informational Services Division, which compiles the annual Uniform Crime Reports, also administers the Bureau's Hate Crime Data Collection Program. In addition to data collection, the bureau conducted training conferences nationwide to teach local law enforcement personnel how to recognize and report hate crimes. Despite efforts to objectively quantify the extent of bias crimes, there was still a great deal of uncertainty whether the incidence of hate crimes was rising, falling, or remaining static. Much seemed to depend on who was doing the reporting and what criteria were being employed to label a particular crime as one motivated by bias instead of some other motivation. An additional factor that became problematic was the ever-increasing list of qualifying motivations: crimes motivated by age, economic status, sexual preference, and other factors became reportable hate-motivated crimes.

Despite the somewhat controversial statistical justifications, most jurisdictions came to consider hate crimes as a serious problem. In response, the federal government, along with the vast majority of states, enacted legislation designated as hate or bias crime laws, which were aimed at diminishing the incidence of bias-motivated crime. These statutes were of essentially two types: those that enhanced sentencing if a crime was found to have been motivated by bias and those that made a bias-motivated crime a separate criminal offense. The laws were meant to deter biased acts by providing for harsher punishment when the criminal selected a victim based on that victim's race, gender, ethnicity, or other enumerated factors. For example, California and Florida enacted laws that prohibit specific activities at specific places. Vandalizing a place of worship or burning a cross on someone else's property would constitute illegal acts under provisions of these states’ statutes. Other states, such as New York, chose to enumerate specific crimes and provided that when the perpetrator was motivated by hate in the commission of any of those enumerated crimes, the offense level was raised, thus effectively increasing the defendant's sentence upon conviction. So a simple assault in New York, an A misdemeanor for which a convicted defendant could be sentenced to up to a year in jail, became an E felony if motivated by hate, exposing the defendant to up to four years in prison.

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