Hate Crimes Hard to Track as Some Areas Report None

A skinhead with dive-bombing Stukas and goose-stepping storm troopers tattooed on his torso ran into a West African immigrant at a downtown bus stop. He taunted, terrorized and finally shot the French-speaking newcomer because he couldn’t stand his skin color.

Isn’t this a hate crime? In the dictionary, perhaps, but not in Denver. Police chose not to submit a textbook attack on a man killed for being black to a federal program that has been trying, for nearly one frustrating decade, to measure bias-based crime in America.

What about a case in which another neo-Nazi slashes the throat of a computer operator, cracks open his skull with an ax handle and then roasts the body because the victim made a pass at him weeks before? What about a trio of men who torch a black church after a KKK rally? Are these hate crimes?

Not in Alabama, which has a law against arson regardless of whether the flame thrower is wearing a hooded white robe or a little black dress, a hate code that covers homicide but does not protect homosexuals, and zero tales of intolerance that police care to share with the rest of the country.

“They are trained on this and told about this, but I don’t think they actually think about it,” said Carol Roberts, an Alabama public information specialist who tallies the zeroes that local police agencies compile for the FBI’s annual hate crime reports.

The failure of police and prosecutors to probe, report and punish a cross-burning or race rumble as a hate crime instead of, say, criminal mischief or assault not only has rendered many laws useless, it has confounded attempts by analysts to get a grip on the extent of bigotry-based mayhem.

A cluster of particularly heinous hate crimes--from the dragging death of a black man in Texas to the bludgeoning of a gay student in Wyoming to the one-man riot of racist Buford O. Furrow Jr.--has triggered bursts of outrage and a bunch of bills, most of which flew uselessly out the window when the nation’s legislatures shut down for the summer.

But the string of high-profile crimes overshadows how rarely authorities are willing to build a case on an intangible concept when a basic crime category may be safer, and how discriminating states can be when it comes to protecting people from a punch thrown with extreme prejudice.

If blind bigotry compels you to clobber a Teamster in Oregon, a kid in a wheelchair in New Jersey, an old woman in Indiana or any woman in Virginia, you theoretically face a harshly enhanced penalty because you’re not just committing a crime against an individual but against society.

If you march and chant in front of the house of a mixed-race couple in Michigan, you could be committing a hate crime. Unless that couple is of the same gender.

Twenty-one states exclude sexual orientation from their laws. Others add age or gender, while some stick to race, creed and color. Eight have no hate crime laws at all. Oregon protects people from prejudice based on political party, purchasing power, union membership, social standing or marital status, to name a handful.

Hard to Enforce Hate Crime Laws

States generally use hate crime laws to enhance existing penalties, either by adding years to a sentence, limiting parole or elevating a misdemeanor to a felony.

Yet while hate laws look good on paper after they’ve been passed by outraged lawmakers, experts in the field say it’s not easy to find a cop when you need to enforce one.

Boston and New Orleans both have about a half million people and a history of disharmony, but the former reported 150 hate crimes to the federal government in 1997 and the latter just one. The city of Miami and state of Hawaii are among the most notable jurisdictions that don’t participate in hate crime monitoring.

While only six out of every 10 police agencies voluntarily report bias crimes to the FBI, four out of five of those say they don’t have any. In the South, only 6% of the police agencies acknowledge having investigated a crime motivated by bias, compared with 20% for the rest of the country.

Nothing puzzles and appalls crime analysts more than Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi, where police agencies collected their hate crimes from 1997 and shipped them off to their state capitals, where all the numbers were tallied and sent on to the FBI. The total? Zero.

This strains the credulity of Jim Nolan, the FBI analyst who crunches hate-crime statistics and trains officers on how to spot, investigate and track hate crime. Yet nine years after Congress passed the Hate Crime Reporting Act so that police agencies would have standard criteria to apply to suspected hate crime, solid statistics still don’t exist.

“We don’t know if hate crimes are up or down,” Nolan said.

After staring at page after page of statistical goose eggs from places where hate crimes are in fact as real as a rock to the head, the Justice Department is awaiting the results of a mammoth study of 2,300 jurisdictions to find out why so many police hate-crime reports look like drawings of doughnut holes.

Though conclusions won’t be ready until December, some trends are emerging, said Jack McDevitt, director of the Center for Criminal Justice Policy Research at Northeastern University in Boston, which was commissioned to do the study.

Among his observations:

* Many police departments are put off by the extra FBI paperwork and the difficulty of determining a motive as elusive as bias. And they feel the media will blow a crime out of proportion if hate is mentioned as a cause.

* Hate crimes have a low conviction rate--about 15%--because spraying a swastika on a synagogue or assaulting a stranger is, by its nature, hard to solve. And victims often bail out of the investigations because they fear retribution.

* Though crime in general is down nationwide, hate crime seems to have merely leveled off in the cities and is rising in some suburbs, especially those in the midst of demographic change.

* Though some experts say police treat hate crime the way they did domestic abuse a decade ago--not very seriously--McDevitt said raising awareness about gay-bashing is even tougher. “You’ve got to get them over their bias that it’s OK, which a lot of them believe.”

* Police and prosecutors pursue the charge most likely to secure a conviction, and most don’t have the expertise to make a hate crime case. Yet hate crime charges are routinely used to threaten a suspect into pleading guilty to something else, since carrying a bias rap into prisons teaming with race-based gangs can be as risky as a nap on the train tracks.

Last year, of 1,800 hate-motivated offenses reported in California, police referred a third to prosecutors. Most copped pleas; only 13 people were found guilty as charged. In Los Angeles County, there was only one such conviction out of 668 offenses investigated. State prison officials say there are only six people serving time for major hate crimes.

“The fact that so few people get convicted of hate crimes undermines their purpose,” McDevitt said. “Hate crimes are about messages. Offenders are trying to send

a message that we don’t want you in our community. The community has to send a message back saying we don’t agree.”

Only 4 Out of 82 Bias Bills Became Law

Some tried. State lawmakers fired 82 hate crime bills at each other in the last year, yet only four became law, said Kelly Anders, a National Conference of State Legislatures lawyer. Vermont put bite into its law by allowing victims to sue their tormentors for civil damages if they can’t get criminal verdicts. Gov. Howard Dean signed the bill because the criminal statute wasn’t getting used.

Virginia added gender and sexual orientation to its list of victims. Arkansas and Illinois established hate crime commissions. Everything else was killed or shelved. Wyoming, which has no hate crime law, rejected eight different incarnations of the concept.

Congress is close to passing a bill to give Washington broader authority to intervene in bias crimes. The Senate approved it last month and the proposal is in the House Judiciary Committee. The bill also would broaden current law to include sexual orientation, age and gender.

Opponents argue that enhancing criminal penalties for crimes against special classes of victims only splinters society and that existing criminal laws are adequate. Yet a recent Gallup Poll showed that 70% of Americans believe a crime prompted by bigotry deserves harsher punishment.

The biggest hurdle is convincing local police to recognize hate crimes and report them as such, Nolan said. “We have a standard definition. There’s no reason why a jurisdiction shouldn’t report a hate crime, regardless of [the state or local] law.”

The FBI has been leaning on departments to do just that. Missing from the numbers, however, will be the November 1997 killing of Oumar Dia, who was standing at a Denver bus stop when he was accosted by 21-year-old Nathan Thill, a gas station employee with a shaved head who’d just had a few drinks at a strip joint and was looking for a black person to blow away.

Thill and another skinhead called Dia racist names, knocked his hat off, opened fire. Thill then shot a mother of two who had tried to intervene, paralyzing her.

Hate crime? “It’s the Police Department’s call,” said Jeannie Ryland, senior crime information specialist for the state.

Denver police Lt. Frank Conner noted that Thill was convicted of homicide and ethnic intimidation. He said the homicide was reported to the FBI, since it was the primary charge, but that somebody in the department decided it wasn’t necessary to fill out an FBI hate crime form.

Denver, where a skinhead killed a police officer just a few months before Dia died, reported four hate crimes to the FBI in 1997.

Still, that’s four more than Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi combined. In Alabama, for example, three young men were convicted in 1997 for burning down a black church two days after a Ku Klux Klan rally. One man had shouted, “Let’s go burn the n----- church!” The crime didn’t make the FBI report.

Neither will the death of Billy Jack Gaither, a 38-year-old gay man in rural Alabama killed by a couple of acquaintances, then tossed onto a ghastly pyre of burning tires. Authorities have convicted two men who said they killed him “because he was queer,” but nobody added his name to the national list of hate crime victims.

A Coosa County sheriff’s deputy said the case was more homicide than hate crime and referred inquiries to Dist. Atty. Fred Thompson, who said sexual orientation didn’t fall under Alabama’s hate crime provision.

Some communities make hate crimes a priority. Chicago’s Cook County and Los Angeles County each have more than two dozen prosecutors devoted to it. Cook County State’s Atty. Richard A. Devine, who wrote a textbook on how to prosecute such crimes, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that tough laws and enforcement had reduced county hate crimes.

What constitutes a hate crime isn’t always clear. Los Angeles County counts as hate offenses violence between gangs of different ethnicity. Some police disagree.

Compton reported no hate crimes last year, even though race plays a role in gang warfare. “If a Latino and a black gang have an incident, is that a hate crime?” asked Compton Police Chief Hourie Taylor. “It’s complex.”

Minnesota is tough on hate crime, but what happens when a college student who claims she was beaten up by guys yelling lesbian slurs galvanizes a community to raise $12,000 to fight bias--then admits she made it up? Confusion, followed by no crime at all.

An insurance industry official recently told a House hearing about a rise in people trying to scam settlements by falsely claiming that their houses or cars were torched, broken into or defaced with spray-painted slurs.

For decades, hate crime debates have come and gone in cycles driven by sensational crimes that seem to be harbingers of worse things to come. The confluence of politics, awful anecdote and interest groups ready to convert a crime into a trend inevitably triggers calls for new laws, said Don Haider-Markel, a University of Kansas political scientist. “But like any sort of symbolic law, once it’s passed it’s generally ignored.”

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Times staff writer Peter Y. Hong and researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.