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Dear Friend,
The email came to my inbox on a Sunday. Its subject read “Hate
crime in Oklahoma.”
Khalid Jabara, an Arab American from Tulsa, had been and shot and
killed by his next-door neighbor two days earlier, on August 12, 2016.
His family was suffering. He was murdered on their front porch. He was
murdered in a hate crime.
Nearly three years have passed since Khalid's death, but his memory
endures.
What we’ve done since that tragic day is an example of pain turned
into action, and a testament to the big difference a small, committed
organization can make—and while I don’t usually talk about us this
way, I need to share this with you.
Hate crime has been a key issue for us since our founding, and in
the past few years especially. Since 2014, we have seen a substantial
increase of hate crimes targeting communities, including our own. At
the same time, we've seen reports of significant undercounts in
official hate crime statistics. Here are just two examples of what
we've recently done:
- We convened stakeholder meetings in 16 states with more than 100
community partners across the country through our #ReportHate
Project, empowering local communities to lead on the response
to this growing hate.
- We tirelessly monitored hate crime data recorded in federal,
state, and local statistics, and published a groundbreaking
report in July 2018 that evaluates the response of all 50
states and the District of Columbia to hate crimes.
Before I tell you more about what we’ve done, I want to
take us back to Khalid.
It was in the process of writing our report that we discovered that
Khalid’s murder—though a high-profile hate crime that received
national and international attention—was not reported
in official FBI hate crime statistics. We were shocked. Even with the
chronic problem of underreporting, how could Khalid be missing given
all the attention his murder received?
We started looking at other high-profile hate crimes and our
findings were devastating.
In what came as a heartbreaking revelation, our research detected
the omissions of other high-profile hate crimes from official
statistics, including the murder
of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12,
2017—exactly one year after Khalid’s murder.
If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s
that communities need more support and
assistance when it comes to hate crime, and that
official hate crime data are seriously underreported.
Hate crime victims are often reluctant to seek help from the
authorities due to fear or distrust of law enforcement, and law
enforcement often lack proper training on reporting, identifying, and
responding to hate crime. And as our research discovered, problems
arise with even the most obvious, high-profile hate crimes.
Simply put, our communities deserve to be more
informed and better protected.
So that's what we're trying to do.
Working with the families of Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer, we
helped advance bipartisan legislation that would improve our hate
crime statistics and provide assistance to hate crime victims and
their communities. Introduced in both houses of Congress last
week, the bill is called the Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer
NO HATE Act.
I am so proud of our AAI team for playing a leading role in
drafting key aspects of this bill, which has received endorsements
from a broad coalition of civil rights and community
organizations.
We are grateful to both Khalid's and Heather’s families—including
the Khalid Jabara Foundation Fund and the Heather Heyer Foundation—for
their support. We acted in the hope their unimaginable loss could help
inform our response to hate crime and possibly prevent other families
from enduring that same pain.
We are also grateful for the leadership of the bill’s original
co-sponsors—Senators Blumenthal, Durbin, Gillibrand, Hirono, Kaine,
and Warner, and Representatives Beyer and Olson.
Finally, we look forward to being in touch again after the
passage of the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act.
Thank you for your continued support.
Best,
Maya Berry
Executive Director
http://www.aaiusa.org/
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