Spread of Hate Crimes Has Lawmakers Seeking Harsher Penalties - New York Times

The anonymous email arrived on a Saturday afternoon, its message jumbled, misspelled, in capital letters. It was not addressed to a specific individual at the Birmingham Islamic Society. Rather, its hateful message was directed at African-Americans, Mexicans and Muslims in general.

Three words stood out: “run or die.”

About 10 miles away, the telephones on the campus of the Levite Jewish Community Center rang four times in six weeks with bomb threats, the third call resulting in the evacuation of children just after morning prayer at the day school.

The interfaith threats were enough to prompt the introduction of a bill in the Legislature expanding Alabama’s hate crime law to include threats against religious institutions and schools.

“We know the story of threats and fear,” said Rodger Smitherman, the Democratic lawmaker who sponsored the bill and whose wife was friends with one of the four girls killed during the 1963 church bombing there. “No one should have to live with being afraid.”

A wave of hateful episodes and attacks have been reported across the country in recent months: threatening calls and notes, physical assaults and confrontations, and even deadly shootings. The response in at least a half-dozen states has been anti-hate legislation aimed at beefing up penalties and expanding definitions of what constitutes hate.

The legal definition of bias-motivated crimes varies from state to state, with the same acts bringing vastly different punishments depending on where they occur. Five states do not have any anti-hate statutes: Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, Wyoming and Indiana, where a bill failed again this year.

A patchwork of state and federal laws, along with underreporting, means it is unclear how often hate crimes occur — a portrait advocates say is needed to help shape public policy and heighten awareness.

The F.B.I.’s latest report, released in November, showed a 6.7 percent rise in reported hate crimes in 2015. But the federal tracking system relies on police departments to voluntarily submit such crimes to the F.B.I. And not all opt to report.

In 2015, the vast majority of law enforcement agencies — about 88 percent — reported that no hate crimes happened in their jurisdiction.

Even without a comprehensive federal number, chilling headlines — along with preliminary data available from academic studies and advocacy groups — indicate that hate crimes are climbing again this year.

A study of law enforcement and government agencies’ data in 25 metropolitan areas showed the number of hate crimes jumped about 6 percent from 2015 to 2016. Hate crimes increased to 1,998 from 1,886, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

“What you are seeing is this widespread feeling of fear and disenfranchisement,” said Brian Levin, the director of the center and a criminal justice professor. “Social, political and demographic changes are becoming so rapid and unpredictable that people are reverting back to a kind of tribalism and acting out with hate crimes or acts of uncivilized bigotry.”

Many advocates point to the caustic presidential election as a culprit for the rash of hate unfolding since November.

More than 130 hoax bomb threats have been called into Jewish community centers across the country. Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized, headstones toppled and broken. Mosques were set on fire in Texas, Washington and Florida, two burned to the ground.

Hate fueled at least three killings. In Kansas, where a hate crime bill that would increase penalties is unlikely to pass, an Indian man was fatally shot and another wounded in February by a gunman who witnesses said screamed “get out of my country” before squeezing the trigger.

In March, the white supremacist James Harris Jackson, 28, drove from Baltimore to New York with the mission to kill random black men. He encountered Timothy Caughman in the streets, fatally stabbing him with a 26-inch sword.

And weeks ago, in a racially charged attack, Kori Ali Muhammad, who went by the name Black Jesus, killed three white men in Fresno, Calif. As Mr. Muhammad, 39, was taken into custody, the police said he shouted, “Allahu akbar.”

Advocacy groups, swamped with phone calls from panicked constituents, have collected their own data — and all show a spike.

An Anti-Defamation League annual audit, released last week, showed that anti-Semitic episodes increased by more than one-third last year and jumped 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017 compared with the same period in 2016.

Similarly, a new report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations details a more than 50 percent increase in anti-Muslim episodes in 2016 over 2015. For the first quarter of 2017, it has recorded 35 episodes targeting mosques, compared with 19 for the same period in 2016.

And since November, the Southern Poverty Law Center has collected nearly 1,800 bias incident reports (which includes hate crimes), a compilation that includes self-reported, police and news media reports, but also accounts for hoaxes.

With the imprecision of the tallies, hate crime experts suggest that the reported numbers do not fully capture the problem.

“Hate crimes are grotesquely underreported,” said Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “We don’t know the state of hate because the data is so horrific.”

After bomb threats were called into four Jewish community centers in New York, a group of Democratic state lawmakers pushed to add another layer of protection to victims of hate crimes. The legislation, which was passed in March, created an offense for graffiti making as a hate crime and stiffened penalties for desecrating a cemetery or damaging property in a house of worship.

“This is very disheartening what we are seeing happen across the country,” said Senator Jeffrey D. Klein, who represents parts of the Bronx and Westchester County and is the grandson of Holocaust survivors.

In Kansas, State Senator David Haley’s hate crime bill was scheduled to be heard in committee the same week that two Indian immigrants, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, were attacked at an Olathe bar by Adam W. Purinton, 51. A third man was wounded when he confronted Mr. Purinton.

To Mr. Haley, a Democrat, the shootings were an exclamation point to legislation he had introduced six other times since 2001. His bill doubles the sentence without the possibility of appeal if a crime is determined to be motivated by bias toward the “race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin or sexual orientation” of the victim.

“The uptick of hate crimes or bias-motivated crimes this last year can be likened to the national climate, mood and discord,” Mr. Haley said. “We have seen a much greater level of intolerance turning aggressive or violent. It is not just Kansas where people are ticking time bombs walking around with such anger and angst.”

Opponents of the bill say that for the most serious crimes, the penalty is already appropriate. State Senator Steve Fitzgerald, a Republican, told The Kansas City Star that critical parts of the bill would limit judges’ discretion. The basis for appeal would also be limited.

“This is grandstanding,” Mr. Fitzgerald told the newspaper.

Undeterred, Mr. Haley said he plans a Hail Mary this week.

“When we return on May 1, we will be undertaking a different approach,” he said. “I am going to try to get the amendment in on a roll-call vote. It’s much more difficult.”

When State Senator Sue Glick introduced a hate crime bill to the Indiana General Assembly in January, she carried with her the memory of an attack on a Muslim woman at a restaurant two years before in Bloomington.

It was not the first time Ms. Glick had pushed for legislation in Indiana, one of the five states without hate crime laws. But this legislative season, with so much attention on hate crimes, she pushed with a new urgency, even relying on her own identity as a white Republican woman to boost the chance of success.

“The truth is, I am a white woman from a small town in Indiana. I am not likely to get discriminated against. I am not Jewish, either, so I felt like maybe I could get it through without people feeling like I had an obvious bias,” she said, vowing to reintroduce the measure next legislative season. “I understand how important this is.”

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