Hate crimes down, but stat can be deceiving

By Ana Ley

Sunday, Dec. 28, 2014 | 2 a.m.

The FBI recently released statistics showing hate crimes are down in Southern Nevada and across the country.

Metro, Henderson and North Las Vegas police departments reported 68 incidents in 2013, down 21 percent from the year before. Agencies nationwide reported 5,928 offenses last year, down 10 percent.

At face value, that sounds like good news, but experts warn the numbers can be deceiving.

Hate crimes are tricky to define

The FBI defines hate crimes as traditional offenses such as murder, arson or vandalism with an added element of bias. Lawmakers define a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.”

Civil rights attorney Allen Lichtenstein said criminal motivations can be nuanced, and lumping offenses into such blunt categories is a knee-jerk approach. Except in the most obvious instances, such as a white supremacist bragging publicly about targeting someone of another race, offenses aren’t likely to be classified as hate crimes.

“I’ve always been a bit concerned by the idea that something automatically is going to be called a hate crime or something is not going to be called a hate crime,” Lichtenstein said. A better option is to adopt “a more holistic, case-by-case analysis and consider what the mitigating factors are. I don’t know that putting it into a statutory form really is that helpful.”

Bias is hard to prove

Prejudice often is mixed with other criminal motives that are hard to peg or quantify. Biases aren’t easy for investigators and prosecutors to identify, because people easily can lie about them.

“Sometimes hate crimes are a very difficult thing to prove,” said Natalie Collins, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nevada.

Just because someone seems to be racist — say, a robber who targets only victims of a certain race or ethnic group — that bias isn’t easy to confirm. Appearance is different from proof.

Under Nevada law, incidents involving a proven bias are treated as crimes with enhancements, which theoretically upgrade the severity of the crime and increase the punishment. But the impact of the hate-crime enhancement is vague. State law requires only that victims be compensated for monetary damages, which they likely would have been anyway, and doesn’t specify harsher penalties for criminals.

The legal complexities raise a question for law enforcement: Why try to prove something is a hate crime if it won’t make a real difference in court?

Hate-crime statistics aren’t consistent

Law enforcement agencies aren’t required to report crime data to the FBI. Because of that, civil rights advocates say the federal agency has unreliable year-to-year comparisons.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said the number of agencies that reported data to the FBI plunged to just 79 percent in 2012, the lowest level since 1995. The trend seems to reflect a diminished interest from officials, he said, noting the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center ended its hate-crime programs in 2009. The Southern Poverty Law Center ended a similar program in 2008 due to dwindling enrollment. The programs taught law enforcement officials how to identify crimes involving bias.

“This apparent lack of interest and focus on hate crimes is worrying,” Potok said, noting that more than half of all hate crimes are never reported to police, and the majority of those that are tend to be categorized as other kinds of crimes.

There actually are 25 to 40 times more hate crimes throughout the United States than the FBI numbers suggest, Potok said.