Hate Crimes: Breakdown by Group

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Hate Crimes Against African Americans

Despite the election of our nation’s first African-American president, African Americans remain by far the most frequent victims of hate crimes. Of the 7,624 hate crime incidents reported nationwide in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available, 34 percent (2,659) were perpetrated against African Americans, a number and percentage of incidents that has changed little over the past 10 years. According to the FBI’s HCSA report, more than twice as many hate crimes were reported against African Americans as against any other group.

From lynching, to burning crosses and churches, to murdering a man by chaining him to a truck and dragging him down a road for three miles, anti-black violence has been and still remains the prototypical hate crime, intended not only to injure and kill individuals but to terrorize an entire group of people. Hate crimes against African Americans have an especially negative impact upon society for the history they recall and perpetuate, potentially intimidating not only African Americans, but other minority, ethnic, and religious groups.

Examples of recent hate crimes committed against African Americans include:

• On Election Night 2008, Ralph Nicoletti and Michael Contreras, both 18, and Brian Carranza, 21, of Staten Island, New York decided shortly after learning of Barack Obama’s election victory “to find African Americans to assault,” according to a federal indictment and other court filings. The men then drove to a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Staten Island, where they came upon a 17 year-old African American who was walking home after watching the election at a friend’s house. One of the defendants yelled “Obama!” Then, the men got out of the car and beat the youth with a metal pipe and a collapsible police baton, injuring his head and legs. The men went on to commit additional assaults that night.Their hate crime spree culminated with crashing their car into a man who they mistakenly believed to be African-American, causing his body to shatter the windshield. While the victim ultimately survived the attack, he was in a coma for a period of time.²⁶ Brian Carranza pleaded guilty to conspiring to assault Staten Island residents after the election of President Obama and faces 10 years in prison. Nicoletti and Contreras pleaded not guilty.²⁷
• Justin Sigler, 19, of Natchitoches, Louisiana, pleaded guilty in December 2008 to conspiring with two other individuals to violate the civil rights of a man in Lena, Louisiana who was the first African American to move into a home in the neighborhood. Sigler and two others fired shotguns at a target on a field adjacent to the victim’s property before one member of the group turned his shotgun away from the target and toward the victim and his house. The next evening, Sigler, dressed in a white robe as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, went with his coconspirators to a field adjacent to the victim’s residence and shouted, “White Power!” and “White Knights!” Shaken by these events, the family eventually sold their home.²⁸
• William A. “Bill” White, the self-proclaimed Commander of the American National Socialist Workers Party, a neo-Nazi group, was indicted by a federal grand jury for, among other charges, using intimidation to delay or prevent the testimony of African-American tenants in an official court proceeding. The tenants were involved in a discrimination case against their landlord. On May 23, 2007, White allegedly mailed letters to the African-American tenants at their Virginia Beach, Virginia homes. The letters displayed the letterhead of the White National Socialist American Working Party, a Nazi swastika and White’s signature and title. The letters read, in part: “I do not know [name redacted] but I do know your type of slum nigger, and I wanted you to know that your actions have not been missed by the white community … and we know that you are and will never be anything other than a dirty parasite — and that our patience with you and the government that coddles you runs thin.” In addition to the letter, White also included a copy of the ANSWP Magazine titled “The Negro Beast and Why Blacks Who Work Aren’t Worth the Cost of Welfare.”The indictment also charged that White threatened to injure “LP,” an African-American journalist. On June 3, 2007, at approximately 11 p.m., White called LP’s personal telephone at his Bowie, Maryland home and spoke with LP’s wife. Fifteen minutes later, White sent LP an e-mail, which read, in part: “You and your fellow black filth are quickly losing ground and I look forward to the rapidly approaching day when whites once again rise up and slaughter and enslave your ugly race to the last man, woman and child. Itz [sic] coming.” White then listed LP’s personal home phone number, date of birth, home address, and wife’s name on overthrow.com and other websites frequented by white supremacists. At the end of the post, White wrote, “His wife gets very upset when you call.”

  Another count of the indictment charged White with threatening to injure “CT,” the African-American mayor of a town in New Jersey. On March 1, 2008, White contacted CT via telephone and spoke with CT’s wife. He identified himself as the Commander of a Neo-Nazi organization and told CT’s wife that he knew where she lived and was going to put a swastika on her front yard. Soon after, White sent an e-mail to CT, which read, in part, as follows: “I recently read of the racism you’ve faced in New Jersey, and I wanted to make something perfectly clear:

  1.You are a nigger unworthy to govern over any white man; and,

  2. Fuck you. You’ve gotten exactly what you deserve from your constituents.

  “Unfortunately, the days when white men would simply burn the local newspaper and run the nigger officials out with tar and feathers are past. However, your incidents give me hope that perhaps we shall see them again. … ps: we know where you live at [CT's address and phone number]. I just spoke to your wife [CT's wife's name]. I hope you got my message.”²⁹

• Benjamin Haskell, 22, Michael Jacques, 24, and Thomas Gleason, 21, all of Springfield, Mass., were arrested on January 16, 2009 for allegedly burning and entirely destroying the Macedonia Church of God in Christ, a predominantly African-American congregation’s nearly completed new church building. The building was burned to the ground on Nov. 5, 2008, hours after the election of President Barack Obama. Investigators determined the fire was caused by gasoline applied to the exterior and interior of the building.³⁰ The three men were indicted by a federal grand jury on January 27, 2009 for conspiring to burn the church in retaliation for the election results.³¹
• Steven Sandstrom, 23, and Gary L. Eye, 22, both of Kansas City, Missouri were sentenced to multiple life sentences on September 9, 2008 for the racially-motivated murder of William L. McCay on March 9, 2005. While McCay was walking to work one morning, Eye attempted to shoot McCay with Sandstrom’s gun as they were driving in a stolen car. He missed and McCay fled. Eye and Sandstrom, afraid that McCay would report them to the police, pursued him. At the next block, Eye got out of the car and fatally shot him.³²

Hate Crimes Against Hispanics

In the five years from 2003-2007, the number of hate crimes reported against Hispanics increased nearly 40 percent (from 426 in 2003 to 595 in 2007). Of all hate crimes reported in the United States in 2007, 7.8 percent were committed against Hispanics. Of hate crimes in 2007 motivated by bias due to the victim’s ethnicity or national origin, nearly 60 percent were committed against Hispanics, up nearly 50 percent from 2003. This alarming increase, and its correlation to increasingly virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric, is discussed above in The State of Hate: Escalating Hate Violence Against Immigrants. Other examples of recent hate crimes committed against Hispanics include:

• In Brooklyn, New York on December 7, 2008, Jose Osvaldo Sucuzhañay, a 31 year-old Ecuadorian and father of two, was walking home from a bar and a church party with his brother, their arms around each other, as is common among men in many Latino cultures. Three men drove up to the brothers yelling anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs. While his brother escaped, Sucuzhañay, who ran a local real estate agency and had lived in New York for a decade, was struck on the head by a beer bottle and fell to the ground. Another attacker beat his head with an aluminum baseball bat. The three attackers continued kicking and punching him. Suffering severe head fractures and extensive brain damage, he died two days later.³³ Keith Phoenix, 28, and Hakim Scott, 25, were indicted on March 3, 2009. The two men were charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and assault, all as hate crimes, and could face 78 years to life in prison. Both men claim that they are not guilty.³⁴

On Long Island, New York on November 8, 2008, Marcelo Lucero, a 37 year-old Ecuadorian real estate agent, was beaten and fatally stabbed by seven teenagers who were driving around to “go find some Mexicans to f— up.” The teens spotted Lucero and a friend, then proceeded “[l]ike a lynch mob…got out of their car and surrounded Mr. Lucero,” beating and stabbing him, according to the local prosecutor. The teenagers, all 17 and 16 years old, were charged with felony gang assault. One of them was also charged with manslaughter as a hate crime. Steve Levy, the County Executive of Suffolk County, where the murder occurred, has frequently and forcefully spoken out against immigrants, including on Lou Dobbs Tonight.

The New York Times editorialized about Lucero’s death and hate crimes against Latinos:

A possible lynching in a New York suburb should be more than enough to force this country to acknowledge the bitter chill that has overcome Latinos in these days of rage against illegal immigration.

The atmosphere began to darken when Republican politicians decided a few years ago to exploit immigration as a wedge issue. They drafted harsh legislation to criminalize the undocumented. They cheered as vigilantes streamed to the border to confront the concocted crisis of Spanish-speaking workers sneaking in to steal jobs and spread diseases. Cable personalities and radio talk-show hosts latched on to the issue. Years of effort in Congress to assemble a responsible overhaul of the immigration system failed repeatedly. Its opponents wanted only to demonize and punish the Latino workers on which the country had come to depend.

A campaign of raids and deportations, led by federal agents with help from state and local posses, has become so pervasive that nearly 1 in 10 Latinos, including citizens and legal immigrants, have told of being stopped and asked about their immigration status, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Now that the economy is in free fall, the possibility of scapegoating is deepening Hispanic anxiety.³⁵

Hate Crimes Against Jews

In 2007, there were 969 reported hate crimes committed against Jews, according to the FBI, constituting 12.7 percent of all hate crimes reported and 69 percent of religious bias hate crimes reported.

The Jewish community — unlike some new immigrant communities — has long understood the importance of reporting crimes directed against community members and institutions. The Anti-Defamation League has been collecting information on anti-Semitic incidents since 1979. Using official crime statistics and information provided to ADL’s regional offices by victims, law enforcement officials, and community leaders, the ADL’s Audit provides an annual snapshot of this activity and helps identify possible trends. In 2007 (the most recent report available), the League reported 1,460 incidents — 761 directed at individuals and 699 directed at institutions.³⁶

The Nazi swastika, one of the most powerfully-enduring symbols of anti-Semitism and religious and ethnic hatred, has been present in hundreds of attacks against buildings, synagogues, cemeteries, and private homes over the past few years. In September 2007, for example, a massive swastika, the size of a football field, was carved into a New Jersey cornfield.

Hate groups continue to utilize the Internet to spread their message of anti-Semitism and hate. In recent years, groups such as the National Socialist Movement and Ku Klux Klan actively contributed to the continued Internet circulation of anti-Jewish conspiracy charges and theories of Jewish control of government, finance, and the media. There are thousands of hate sites on the Internet, and they continue to multiply. Many of these sites include Internet radio shows and downloadable music and games with anti-Semitic themes and propaganda. Extremists also continued to exploit social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs, using text messages and videos to propagate anti-Semitism.

Examples of recent anti-Semitic hate crimes include:

• On June 10, 2009, a white supremacist and anti-Semite entered the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Mall in Washington, DC and opened fire, killing a security guard, Stephen T. Johns, before being critically wounded himself. The shooter, James Von Brunn, has published an anti-Semitic book and created an anti-Semitic Web site, on which he posted Holocaust denial essays and embraced various conspiracy theories involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups. He had been arrested and imprisoned in 1981 for using a sawed-off shotgun to try to take Federal Reserve Board members hostage on the grounds that Jews control the nation’s banking system.That night, President Obama issued a statement saying, in part, “This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms. No American institution is more important to this effort than the Holocaust Museum, and no act of violence will diminish our determination to honor those who were lost by building a more peaceful and tolerant world.” Later in the week, the House of Representatives passed H Res 529 (pdf) and the Senate passed S Res 184 (pdf) to condemn the attack, support the important work of the Holocaust Museum, and express condolences to the family of Officer Johns.
• On May 20, 2009, four New York residents were arrested for an alleged plot to attack two synagogues in the Bronx and to shoot down planes at a military base in Newburgh, New York. They were arrested after planting what they believed to be bombs in cars outside of the Riverdale Temple and the nearby Riverdale Jewish Center. They also plotted to destroy military aircraft at the New York Air National Guard Base located at Stewart Airport in Newburgh, New York.Evidence indicates that the four perpetrators were Muslims and were motivated to act because of their hatred of America and Jews. “These were people who were eager to bring death to Jews,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Snyder said at a court hearing the day after the arrests. “These are extremely violent men.” Authorities said the men were angry over the U.S. war in Afghanistan and had voiced hatred of Jews

  The men reportedly began surveillance of several synagogues and a Jewish Community Center in the Bronx in April 2009. In preparation for the attack, the men went to a warehouse in Stamford, Connecticut to obtain what they believed to be a surface-to-air guided missile system and three IEDs, which they transported back to Newburgh. The men also purchased a semiautomatic handgun to use during the planned terrorist operation.

  On June 2, the U.S. District Court in New York returned an eight-count indictment against the four suspects, adding three counts of attempting to use weapons of mass destruction and two counts of conspiracy to kill U.S. officers and employees.

• In December 2007, four Jewish students from Hunter and Baruch Colleges in New York City were assaulted on a subway train by a group of eight assailants as they wished people a happy Hanukkah. At least two victims were punched in the face, and a knife was pulled. Police arrested the assailants after the train was stopped.
• In January 2008, more than 50 headstones were overturned and vandalized in a northwest Chicago Jewish cemetery. The headstones were sprayed with anti-Semitic images, such as swastikas and the Star of David hanging from a gallows. Some grave markers also contained white supremacist symbols. A 21 year-old self-professed neo-Nazi was arrested and charged with felony hate crime and felony criminal damage to property.
• In July 2006, an individual forced his way into the building of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and went on a murderous rampage, killing one woman, Pam Waechter, 58, and seriously injuring five others, one of whom was 17 weeks pregnant. Eyewitnesses reported that the murderer, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, forced his way through a security door and announced “I’m a Muslim American; I’m angry at Israel” as he began shooting. The perpetrator told a 911 dispatcher “I want these Jews to get out….I’m upset at your foreign policy. These are Jews….” He was arrested and charged with fifteen felony counts, including murder. In June 2008, a jury deadlocked on the question of the insanity of the perpetrator. The King County prosecutor has promised to retry the case. The trial is scheduled for October 2009.³⁷

Hate Crimes Against Asian Pacific Americans

Ignorance, racism, and anti-immigrant sentiment cause hate violence targeting of Asian Pacific Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese descent, and other heritages. In 2007, 2.5 percent of all reported hate crimes (188 out of 7,624) were committed against Asian Pacific Americans, a ratio that has declined slightly relative to other groups over the past decade.

This decline obscures an extremely disturbing fact: many of these hate crimes are perpetrated against Asian Pacific American children, often by other children. In a troubling article titled “Asian Youth Persistently Harassed By U.S. Peers,” the Associated Press chronicled these hate crimes committed against Asian Pacific American youth:

• In 2005, while waiting on a subway platform in Brooklyn, New York, 18 year-old Chen Tsu was accosted by four high school classmates who demanded his money. After Tsu showed his classmates his pockets were empty, they assaulted him, taking turns beating his face. Tsu was scared and injured — bruised and swollen for several days — but hardly surprised. At his school, Lafayette High in Brooklyn, Chinese immigrant students like him are harassed and bullied so routinely that school officials in June agreed to a Department of Justice consent decree to curb alleged “severe and pervasive harassment directed at Asian-American students by their classmates.” Said Tsu after his beating, “Those guys looked like they could kill somebody. … I was scared to go back to school.”
• In South Boston, 16 year-old Vietnamese student Bang Mai was killed on July 11, 2004 in a massive brawl between white and Vietnamese youths. The basketball court brawl was the result of weeks of tension between the two groups. Mai was fatally stabbed as he attempted to walk away from the brawl. Sixteen year-old Keith E. Gillespie was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to five years in prison.³⁸
• In Fresno, California at Edison High School, Hmong students had been taunted and had food thrown at them during lunch. On February 25, 2005, the taunts escalated into fights involving at least 30 students, resulting in numerous injuries, suspensions, and expulsions. Eight students were convicted of misdemeanor assault.³⁹

Across the nation, the Associated Press found that Asian students say they are often beaten, threatened, and called ethnic slurs by other young people, and school safety data suggest that the problem may be worsening. Youth advocates say these Asian teens, stereotyped as high-achieving students who rarely fight back, have for years borne the brunt of ethnic tension as Asian communities expand and neighborhoods become more racially diverse. “We suspect that in areas that have rapidly growing populations of Asian Americans, there often times is a sort of culture clashing,” said Aimee Baldillo of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (now the Asian American Justice Center). Youth harassment is “something we see everywhere in different pockets of the U.S. where there’s a large influx of (Asian) people.”⁴⁰

Other examples of hate crimes committed against Asian Pacific Americans include:

• In August 2006, four New Yorkers of Chinese descent were attacked in Douglaston, Queens, New York by two white men shouting racial epithets. The white men beat two of the Chinese Americans with a steering wheel locking bar. Kevin M. Brown, 19, of Auburndale, and Paul A. Heavey, 20, of Little Neck, were charged with assault and hate crimes. Douglaston and other nearby communities are now almost one-third Asian, and tensions have escalated. “There’s an undercurrent of suspicion of the new immigrant — what are they doing, what are they building, what are they putting in that store?” said Susan Seinfeld, the district manager of Community Board 11, which includes Douglaston. A local City Councilman has introduced legislation to require store owners to include English translations on signs.⁴¹“It definitely doesn’t shock me,” said one white resident of the area about the attack. “The entire strip of Northern Boulevard in the past four or five years went from German and Italian to Korean.”⁴²
• In Chicago in September 2007, Du Doan, a 62 year-old Vietnamese man, was pushed off a fishing pier into the icy waters of Lake Michigan, where he drowned. John Haley, 31, a self-described “skinhead,”⁴³ was charged with first degree murder after he told police how he “pushed our victim in the water — that being taking both hands, shoving them in the back, and literally catapulting him into the water.” Earlier, Haley reportedly pushed a second Asian man into Lake Michigan who was able to swim safely to shore and also tried to shove a third Asian man off the pier who fought him off. Despite these reports, police did not charge Haley with a hate crime and have not classified the murder as a hate crime incident.⁴⁴

Hate Crimes Against Arab Americans, Muslims, and Sikhs

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the number of hate crimes directed against Arab Americans, Muslims, and Sikhs escalated dramatically. In 2001, Arab Americans, Muslims, and Sikhs were victimized in nearly five percent of the total number of hate crimes reported that year (481 out of 9,730), a seventeen-fold increase over the prior year. While the number of reported hate crimes against Arab Americans, Muslims, and Sikhs has declined from the peak of 2001, it remains substantially above pre-2001 levels. In 2007, for example, 115 hate crimes were reported — more than four times as many as were reported in 2000.

Examples of hate crimes against Arab Americans, Muslims, and Sikhs include:

• In January 2009, Memphis store clerk Mohammed Al Hadi was murdered by an unknown assailant who calmly took aim and then fired, as if “he has some vendetta.” On the same day, at another grocery story nearby, another clerk of Middle Eastern descent was also murdered.

  “It’s terrible and I hate it because I knew the young man and he was nice,” said one community resident. But a community activist warned that the store owners will need “to have a lot of security because this is not the end. This is only the beginning.”⁴⁵

  The two murders came on the heels of the killing on New Year’s Day 2009 of an African American during an angry confrontation with another Middle Eastern store clerk, who police charged with murder. Following the shooting, unknown perpetrators set fire to the store and an employee’s car, and activists called for a boycott of “all Arab-owned businesses in the neighborhood.”⁴⁶

  This incident reveals a significant problem with likely underreporting of hate crimes by law enforcement authorities. As of the date of this report, Memphis Police had classified the deaths of the two Middle Eastern grocery clerks as robberies, not hate crimes.⁴⁷ On March 6, 2009 George Williams was arrested and charged with first degree murder in perpetration of a robbery.⁴⁸

• In Berkeley, California in September 2004, eight female Muslim students at the University of California were accosted by three white males who sprayed water on them, pelted them with water bottles, screamed derogatory statements, and mocked the traditional hijabs worn by some Muslim women. One woman was called an “East Oakland nigger.” Two of the Muslim women reported that while this was the first time they have been physically confronted in Berkeley, verbal racial taunts are frequent.⁴⁹
• On a Lake Tahoe beach in July 2007, Vishal Wadhwa, 38, suffered fractures of several facial bones and an orbital fracture in one eye after being kicked and beaten by Joseph and Georgia Silva. Wadhwa approached the Silvas after they called him, his fiancée, and her cousin “terrorists,” “relatives of Osama Bin Laden,” and other slurs. The Silvas mistakenly believed the three victims “were Iraqi or Iranian or Middle Eastern” — in fact, they are all Indian American.

  In August 2008, the Silvas pleaded guilty to misdemeanors after a judge dismissed hate crime charges against Joseph Silva, finding that prosecutors had failed to prove that the attack was motivated by hate or prejudice or that sufficient force was used to make the crime a felony.⁵⁰

• In October 2008, Gagandeep Singh, a 10 year-old Sikh boy, was assaulted while walking home from school in Wayne, New Jersey by an unknown assailant who threw him to the ground and then cut his hair. To Sikhs, the cutting of hair is a particularly hateful crime, as they consider their hair a gift from God. “He came out of nowhere,” Singh said. “He just came up behind me, threw me on the floor, held me with his feet and cut my hair with the knife or scissor. Then I jumped a few fences and ran away because I was so scared.” Singh wonders of his assailant, “Why did you cut my hair? What do you want from Punjabis?”

  A few weeks later, a 67 year-old Sikh man was viciously beaten in the same community. “I said, ‘What do you want?’ And he hit me,” Ajit Singh Chima said. “A blow on the nose knocked me to the ground, [then] he kept punching and punching.”

  Authorities believe the same assailant committed both crimes and that the motive was hate.⁵¹

  Hate Crimes Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender Individuals

  Reported hate crimes committed against individuals because of their sexual orientation increased in 2007 to 1,265, the highest level in five years. Of all hate crimes reported in 2007, the proportion committed against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals rose to 16.6 percent, also the highest level in five years. According to the FBI’s HCSA reports, gay men and lesbians have consistently been the third most frequent target of hate violence over the past decade.

  The result of this increase in hate crimes based on sexual orientation is heightened fear and insecurity among LGBT individuals. Says Candace Nichols of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Southern Nevada, “Every time I get into an elevator with people, if I’m not by myself, I make sure I’m with a friend. When I go to the bathroom, I always make sure someone is with me, and that’s not something I used to do.”⁵²

  “Until we address the root causes of bias toward (LGBT) people, we’ll continue to have hate perpetrated against us,” says Shawna Virago, a program director for the San Francisco advocacy group Community United Against Violence.⁵³

  Examples of high profile hate crimes committed against LGBT individuals that have heightened fear and insecurity and perpetuated hate against them include:

  • In Richmond, California on December 13, 2008, an openly gay 28 year-old woman was attacked and gang raped by four men, including two juveniles, on a street outside her parked car. The perpetrators took her to a second location and assaulted her again, all the while making slurs about her sexual orientation. As Shawna Virago noted, “The only way we know about (the Richmond) case is because of the bravery of the survivor coming out. Hatred and bias are a routine occurrence for many LGBT people.” Two men and a teenager were charged on January 6, 2009. Thirty-one year-old Humberto Hernandez Salvador, 21 year-old Josue Gonzalez, and 16 year-old Darrell Hodges were charged with kidnapping, carjacking and gang rape. A 15 year-old boy was also arrested in connection with the attack.⁵⁴ Hate crime enhancements were added to charges against Salvador.⁵⁵

    “What you get is this kind of immature desire to display power,” said Jose Feito, a psychology professor at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. “And so they go looking for easy victims, or suitable victims.” “Suitable” in the Richmond case, according to Feito, meant a victim who the perpetrators could marginalize in their minds due to her sexual orientation and gender nonconformity. “That all ties into blaming the victim, who’s seen as flaunting their homosexuality.”⁵⁶

  • In Oxnard, California on February 12, 2008, 15 year-old Lawrence King was sitting in a computer lab at his junior high school when Brandon McInerney, 14, shot him twice in the head as their fellow students watched in horror. “Even before his death, Larry King was notorious,” according to press reports. “He was the sassy gay kid who bragged about his flashy attire and laughed off bullying, which for him included everything from name-calling to wet paper towels hurled in his direction. King was an easy target — he stood 5 foot 4 and was all of 100 pounds.”⁵⁷ In McInerney’s bedroom, investigators discovered a “trove” of white supremacist literature and drawings, depicting a “racist skinhead philosophy of the variety espoused by Tom Metzger, David Lane and others,” according to a prosecution filing with the court. McInerney is being tried as an adult on a murder count, plus a hate crime allegation.⁵⁸
  • In Greeley, Colorado on July 16, 2008, Angie Zapata, 20, was fatally beaten by her date after he discovered she was transgender. Zapata’s killer, Allen Andrade, told police that after he discovered Zapata had male genitalia, he hit her twice in the head with a fire extinguisher thinking he had, in his words, “killed it.” Andrade was reportedly a member of a Colorado gang that is reputed to have a zero-tolerance policy on homosexuality. He was charged with first degree murder and a hate crime.⁵⁹ Andrade was found guilty of these crimes on April 22, 2009.
  • In Greenville, South Carolina on May 21, 2007, Sean Kennedy, a gay man, died of injuries sustained after he was attacked outside a bar. While making derogatory comments regarding Kennedy’s sexual orientation, the assailant fatally beat and punched him until he fell, hitting his head on the pavement. The killer was originally charged with murder, but his charge was reduced to involuntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to five years in prison, which was suspended to three years with credit for the seven months he had already served. He was also ordered to attend both anger management and drug/alcohol management classes. No hate crime was charged as South Carolina is one of only five states (along with Arkansas, Georgia, Wyoming, and Indiana) that do not have a penalty-enhancement hate crime law.⁶⁰
    

    Hate Crimes Against Individuals with Disabilities

    In 2007, 79 hate crimes were reported against individuals with disabilities, one percent of the total reported. This represents a significant increase from the 44 hate crimes (0.44 percent of the total) reported in 2003.

    Through much of our country’s history and well into the twentieth century, people with disabilities — including those with developmental delays, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and other physical and mental impairments — were seen as useless and dependent, hidden and excluded from society, either in their own homes or in institutions. Now, this history of isolation is gradually giving way to inclusion in all aspects of society, and people with disabilities everywhere are living and working in communities alongside family and friends. But this has not been a painless process. People with disabilities often seem “different” in the eyes of people without disabilities. They may look different or speak differently. They may require the assistance of a wheelchair, a cane, or other assistive technologies. They may have seizures or difficulty understanding seemingly simple directions. These perceived differences evoke a range of emotions in others, from misunderstanding and apprehension to feelings of superiority and hatred.

    Bias against people with disabilities takes many forms, often resulting in discriminatory actions in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Disability bias can also manifest itself in the form of violence — and it is imperative that a message be sent to our country that these acts of bias motivated hatred are not acceptable in our society.

    Numerous disability and criminology studies, over many years, indicate a high crime rate against people with disabilities. However, the U.S. Office on Crime Statistics reported in 2002 that in many cases, crime victims with disabilities have never participated in the criminal justice process, “even if they have been repeatedly and brutally victimized.” There are a number of challenges for disability-based hate crime reporting. For instance, hate crimes against people with disabilities are often never reported to law enforcement agencies. The victim may be ashamed, afraid of retaliation, or afraid of not being believed. The victim may be reliant on a caregiver or other third party to report the crime, who fails to do so. Or, the crime may be reported, but there may be no reporting of the victim’s disability, especially in cases where the victim has an invisible disability that they themselves do not divulge.

    Perhaps the biggest reason for underreporting of disability-based hate crimes is that disability-based bias crimes are all too frequently mislabeled as “abuse” and never directed from the social service or education systems to the criminal justice system. Even very serious crimes — including rape, assault, and vandalism — are too-frequently labeled “abuse.”

    In one of the few disability-bias cases successfully prosecuted, in 1999, Eric Krochmaluk, a man with cognitive disabilities from Middletown, N.J., was kidnapped, choked, beaten, burned with cigarettes, taped to a chair, his eyebrows shaved, and ultimately abandoned in a forest. Eight people were subsequently indicted for this hate crime — making this one of the first prosecutions of a disability-based hate crime in America.

    The special problems associated with investigating and prosecuting hate violence against someone with a disability makes the availability of federal resources for state and local authorities all that much more important to ensure that justice prevails. To address this need, the pending Local Law Enforcement Hate Crime Prevention Act (LLEHCPA), discussed below, will expand existing federal criminal civil rights protections to include disability-based hate crimes.

    It is critical that people with disabilities are covered in the federal hate crimes statute in order to bring the full protection of the law to those targeted for violent, bias-motivated crimes simply because they have a disability.

  Hate Crimes Against Women

  The number of hate crimes committed against women, as well as the rate of increase or decrease, is unknown. The reason is that the Hate Crime Statistics Act was passed, signed into law, and reauthorized without including hate crimes against women as a class. Other federal laws and many state hate crime statutes also exclude bias crimes targeting women.

  In recent years, many women’s advocates have spoken out about the alarming rate of violent physical and sexual assaults against women. Although the most common forms of violence against women have traditionally been viewed as “personal attacks,” or even the victim’s “own fault,” there is growing recognition that many assaults against women are not “random” acts of violence but are actually bias-related crimes. As one advocate testified before Congress “women and girls…. are exposed to terror, brutality, serious injury, and even death because of their sex.”

  One of the most horrific examples of a gender-based hate crime is the 2006 shooting of 10 young Amish girls at the Georgetown Amish School in Bart Township, Pa., about 60 miles west of Philadelphia. Armed with three guns, two knives, and 600 rounds of ammunition, Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, burst into the one-room schoolhouse and shot the girls at close range in the back of the head. Five were killed: Lena Miller, 7, and Mary Liz Miller, 8; Naomi Ebersol, 7; Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12; and Marian Fisher, 13. Five others were seriously wounded. Although Roberts lived in the area, he was not Amish, and reportedly did not know his victims personally. After Roberts arrived at the school, he separated the boys, ages 6 to 13, from the girls, and allowed the boys to leave. He then lined the girls against a blackboard and bound their feet with wire ties and plastic handcuffs before shooting them. Local authorities reported that “[A]pparently there was some sort of an issue in his past that he, for some reason, wanted to exact revenge against female victims.”⁶¹

  Existing federal law authorizes involvement in federal crimes in which the defendant “intentionally selects a victim, or in the case of a property crime, the property that is the object of the crime, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person.”⁶²In addition, federal investigators and prosecutors have authority to be involved in a limited range of nonfederal hate crimes (some cases in which the victim was targeted because of race, color, religion, or national origin) but not violent crimes motivated by the victim’s gender. The pending LLEHCPA would fill this gap in current law and would also require the FBI to collect statistics on gender-motivated crimes from police departments across the country under the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990. These changes are crucial for women who might otherwise not be afforded relief by the criminal justice system.

  The pending federal hate crime legislation would not convert every instance of domestic violence, rape, or sexual assault into a prosecution under the federal hate crime law. The law applies only to felony crimes that involve a direct connection to interstate or foreign commerce, which requires, for example, that the perpetrator or victim crossed state lines or that the perpetrator employed a weapon that traveled in interstate commerce. The legislation would also limit federal involvement to those instances in which the Attorney General (or an authorized designee) not only certifies that the crime appears to be motivated by gender bias, and confirms the need for federal intervention by certifying in each instance that local officials cannot or will not act, or have requested federal assistance, or fail to adequately prosecute the incident.

  It is important to note that not every violent crime against women is a bias crime, just as not every crime against an African American is based on racial prejudice. Federal courts already routinely assess the question of gender motivation in the context of workplace discrimination claims and claims raised under other federal civil rights laws, such as 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Prosecutors and judges can rely on the same totality of the circumstances analysis — considering the language, nature and severity of the attack, absence of another apparent motive, patterns of behavior, and common sense — to determine whether a violent crime was motivated by gender bias. A look at the actual numbers of prosecutions under state hate crimes laws further stems any concern that this legislation will open the floodgates to federal hate crimes prosecutions. States that recognize gender-based hate crimes have not been overwhelmed by prosecutions of domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault under their existing hate crimes laws. Instead, these laws have operated in a very targeted way. The experience in these states demonstrates that protection against gender-motivated bias crimes is essential.

  Hate Crimes Against Juveniles

  There is little published information about juvenile hate crime offenders. The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics Act report does not provide specific information about either juvenile hate crime offenders or victims. However, it does document that schools and colleges were the third most frequent locations for hate crimes in 2007 — as they have been in every year since 2000.

  In addition, according to the annual U.S. Department of Justice/Department of Education report Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2007, 11 percent of students ages 12-18 reported that someone at school had used hate-related words against them, and more than one-third (38 percent) reported seeing hate-related graffiti at school in 2005.⁶³

  An October 2001 report by the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics provided disturbing information about the too-frequent involvement of juveniles in hate crimes. Analyzing nearly 3,000 of the 24,000 hate crimes to the FBI from 1997 to 1999, the report found that a disproportionately high percentage of both the victims and the perpetrators of hate violence were young people under 18 years of age:

  • Thirty-three percent of all known hate crime offenders were under 18; those under 18 constituted 31 percent of all violent crime offenders and 46 percent of the property offenders.
  • Another 29 percent of all hate crime offenders were 18-24.
  • Thirty percent of all victims of bias-motivated aggravated assaults and 34 percent of the victims of simple assault were under 18.⁶⁴

(C) 2010 The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights/The Leadership Conference Education Fund. All rights reserved.  Entire Article retrieved from:http://www.civilrights.org/publications/hatecrimes/

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