Many Hate Crimes Go Unreported by Police Agencies

Politicians have declared war on hate crimes over the last few years, vowing each time to act swiftly to stem the rise of hate before it unravels their communities.

But no one ever knows for sure whether hateful acts have become more or less frequent in Los Angeles County because many police departments and school districts fail to consistently report them.

After the immediate furor following catastrophic blowups like this year’s shooting rampage at the North Valley Jewish Community Center, the day-to-day job of tracking crimes motivated by prejudice and bigotry falls on police chiefs, school principals and other local officials, many of whom admit shortcomings and are pledging to do better.

The spotty reporting of hate crimes is a national problem, with Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi regularly reporting, for example, that they have no bias-based crimes.

But those who study hate crimes in Los Angeles are especially troubled by what they believe is a lack of diligence by officials in a county that is one of the nation’s most diverse.

Of the 45 police departments in Los Angeles County that shared hate crime information with the county Human Relations Commission, 19 reported zero hate crimes in 1998. California law considers a hate crime to be any illegal act motivated, even partly, by race, religion, sexual orientation or physical or mental disabilities, and requires that they be reported.

Although some agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, are known for diligently tabulating hate incidents, other jurisdictions often ignore hate as a crime motive. The failure by some agencies to identify hate crimes angers local officials who risk saddling their city or school district with a reputation as a bigotry hot spot simply by following state law.

“Everybody is not reporting the same kinds of things. The reporting system is flawed and the data is not reliable,” said Ronald R. Ingels, chief of the La Verne Police Department and a past president of the Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Assn.

Even the Los Angeles Unified School District, which after a spate of campus fights in the mid-1990s pledged to keep better track of campus hate crimes, annually records few hate-related incidents among its 710,000 students.

Robin Toma, assistant executive director of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, said the dearth of hate crime information from public schools is troubling because most hate crime victims in Los Angeles County are minors.

Toma said better reporting, for example, would have made district officials aware of simmering tensions at Grant High School, which in October had a campus fight between Armenian and Latino students. Grant students interviewed by the commission after the brawl--which involved as many as 200 students--said there had been many conflicts among Latinos and Armenians at the San Fernando Valley campus, according to Toma.

Yet school district statistics show no hate crimes at Grant in the past two years. The fight has not been recorded as a hate crime. “I think it really started as an incident between two students, and their friends joined in,” said Dan M. Isaacs, assistant superintendent of operations.

But that view differs sharply from accounts by students in the fight, Toma said. “When students were asked what caused the fight, the vast majority recognized that race was a part of it,” he said. Among 44 Grant students surveyed by the commission, with assistance from the U.S. Department of Justice, most cited racism and racial pride as its primary cause, followed by long-standing tensions between Latino and Armenian students.

Since the Los Angeles school police began collecting hate crime statistics in 1995, they have recorded 62 hate crimes, at a rate of 10 to 20 a year. Only a handful of hate incidents--things like name-calling that are not serious enough to be considered crimes, but might help to alert officials to rising tensions--are reported by schools each year.

With nearly three-quarters of a million students at 660 schools, human relations experts--and even some school district officials--believe many hate crimes are not being reported by principals.

One possible reason, said Joe Hicks, executive director of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission, is that “to move up the [school district] career ladder, a principal has to appear to be totally in control. What most troubles me is that some principals might feel their careers will be harmed [by reporting hate crimes on their campuses].”

Stuart Bernstein, director of the school district’s office of intergroup relations, said principals may not think it is important to report hate incidents to the district after they have punished or counseled students on campus.

The district issued a bulletin in 1998 that directs principals to report all hate incidents and even included a form for reporting them. But Bernstein said that at many schools, the bulletin was probably buried in the avalanche of paperwork he said principals face.

“We’re beating the living hell out of them with questions,” Bernstein said. “They’re inundated with requests for data.”

Bernstein compared hate crime reporting to the district’s first efforts to comply with state laws requiring child abuse reporting. It took several years for principals to diligently report suspected abuse cases, Bernstein said.

School principals are required to review the district’s policy on child abuse reporting with school employees twice a year. Bernstein said a similar requirement for hate crime reporting might prompt principals to more closely track such incidents.

Cities such as Azusa in the east San Gabriel Valley that have faithfully reported hate crimes feel their image has been harmed as a result. When Azusa’s Police Department recorded the highest number of hate crimes in the San Gabriel Valley two years ago, the city found itself identified in newspaper headlines as the region’s hate crime leader.

“We trained our officers, we devoted an investigator [to hate crimes], and it backlashed on us,” said Azusa Police Capt. Karen Pihlak. Although she avoids naming other police departments, Pihlak said that much larger cities nearby reported far fewer hate crimes, despite having comparable crime rates and similar racial diversity.

“They’re not playing by the rules. I can’t get to their numbers, but I know we’re not higher than places with more than 100,000 residents,” Pihlak said.

Despite the risk of bad publicity, Pihlak said, it is crucial for cities to accurately track hate crimes. In Azusa, she said, the department assigned more patrols to a neighborhood next to a park where hate crimes were a recurring problem, and eventually solved the problem. If the crimes had not been reported as hate crimes--instead, say, as misdemeanor assaults--they would not have received the same response, she said.

LAPD Det. Tom King, who oversees the department’s hate crime monitoring, agreed that accurate hate crime data is an important tool for police. The LAPD has been keeping hate crime statistics since 1990, and this year created an online database that allows officers to search for reported hate crimes and incidents by location and victims’ ethnicity.

“When the chief meets with a captain, he can say ‘I see you have 10 hate crimes in your area this year, what are you doing about it ?’ ” King said. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department this year is implementing a hate crimes statistics system modeled after the LAPD.

Local police chiefs recently acknowledged that they need to catch up to such efforts. The county police chiefs association--representing the 46 cities not policed by the LAPD or Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department--pledged this fall to strengthen hate crime reporting.

The final language of a memorandum of understanding, which the chiefs have agreed to in principle, is being written. It calls on departments to make sure officers are trained to report hate crimes, recognizing that such reporting is a top department priority.

As part of the agreement, the county Human Relations Commission will list hate crime totals in its annual report by regions instead of individual cities. The commission and police chiefs hope that will allow cities to report hate crimes without the fear of being stigmatized.

Azusa Police Capt. Pihlak emphasized that better reporting is crucial to fighting hate crimes.

“I need the data to know where to deploy my resources. I do not want to minimize it,” he said. “I want to know how best to address the problem, and I can’t do that without accurate information.”