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Friend,
When three women of Korean descent were shot by a gunman at a Dallas hair salon last week, it was a stark reminder of the violence that has targeted the Asian community amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The attack, which the women survived, came almost one year after President Biden signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, an effort to address hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) fueled by escalating anti-Asian rhetoric – including the words of former President Donald Trump – since the virus emerged from China.
Signed on May 20, 2021, the act focuses on strengthening relationships between police and the AAPI community through cultural competency and language training and improved hate-crime data collection. Though the federal government has been collecting data on hate crimes since 1991, reporting from thousands of state and local law enforcement agencies is voluntary, resulting in significant gaps. The expectation is that better data on the nature and magnitude of the problem will bolster hate crime prevention and prosecution. While the act specifically addresses anti-AAPI crime, all hate crime victims will benefit from funding incentives for state and local law enforcement authorities to identify, report and respond to hate crimes.
For the Southern Poverty Law Center, the legislation was an important step forward after decades of work combating the threat of hate crime. One year later, the act continues to hold great promise amid ongoing work by advocacy organizations such as the SPLC and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
“The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act was the single most significant piece of legislation to improve federal hate crime data since the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990,” said Michael Lieberman, the SPLC’s senior policy counsel for hate and extremism.
Still, because compliance by law enforcement agencies is voluntary, their reporting is incomplete and haphazard.
“There have been consistent reporting gaps for 30 years,” said Lieberman, who led the SPLC’s advocacy in support of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act and was among advocates who helped shape outreach and training under the Hate Crimes Statistics Act during his years as the Anti-Defamation League’s Washington, D.C., counsel.
The problem is clear: Out of the more than 15,000 agencies that participated in the FBI data collection effort in 2020, only about 2,400 – less than 16% – reported one or more hate crimes. Every other agency, including almost 70 cities with populations over 100,000, reported zero hate crimes or did not report any data to the FBI at all.
The FBI defines 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, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”
The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act uses the carrot-and-stick approach to induce local and state law enforcement agencies to fight hate. To receive a piece of the hundreds of millions of dollars in funding the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) allocates annually, an agency must demonstrate a good faith effort to improve hate crime training and the collection and reporting of hate crime data. If they don’t, the DOJ may seek repayment of the grants.
“Data drives policy, so as our data gets better we will be in a better position to prevent, deter and, if necessary, respond to hate crimes, because we can then focus and allocate resources to hot spots,” Lieberman said.
What is apparent on the act’s anniversary is that there is still much work ahead, if the latest data and analyses are any indication.
Hate crimes against all Americans rose 24.4% in 16 major U.S. cities in 2021 over the previous year. However, across 21 cities there was a 224% rise of hate crimes against victims of Asian descent during the same period, from 114 to 369. These figures were provided to the SPLC by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino from its forthcoming publication Report to the Nation, which analyzes FBI data.
“COVID isn’t going away,” said SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang, who attended the signing ceremony for the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act and is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant father and an American-born mother. “Trump was an instigator, but the pandemic is still here. … Anti-AAPI sentiment isn’t going away.”
In March, the SPLC submitted policy recommendations as part of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on countering rising hate crime. Among them: that the DOJ enlist all 94 U.S. attorneys to help promote the reporting of hate crimes and civil rights violations in their jurisdictions. The SPLC also called for the designation of a person or team to lead these efforts and serve as a liaison between police and AAPI communities.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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