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Hate Crime Prevention

Hundreds of thousands of hate crimes are committed each year.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 190,000 hate crimes are committed each year. Fifty-five percent of hate crimes committed in 2004 were based on racial prejudice. Another 13 percent were attributed to religious bias, 18 percent were based on sexual orientation and 29 percent were motivated by prejudice against the victim’s ethnicity or national origin. Many hate crimes are motivated by more than one bias.1
Hate crimes are not ordinary crimes—they are intended to send a threatening message to a particular group within a community.
Perpetrators motivated by intolerance and bigotry harass or attack victims because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or disability. A hate crime is more serious than a conventional crime because it is not directed at just the immediate victim—hate crimes are intended to intimidate members of the victim’s community.
Hate crimes against transgender people are a serious problem.
Violent crime against transgender people occurs with alarming frequency, but because these incidents are vastly under reported, there is little statistical data to quantify the precise number of such crimes that occur each year. One of the few attempts to determine the prevalence of hate crimes against transgender people is a 2000 study of Washington D.C. conducted by the District of Columbia Health Department. The Washington D.C. Transgender Needs Assessment Survey reported that 43 percent of respondents had been victims of violent crime—75 percent of these crimes were motivated by transgender bias. Seventeen percent had been assaulted with a weapon.2
Hate crime laws send a clear message that hate will not be tolerated.
While hate crimes cannot be legislated out of existence, separate charges or enhanced sentences make the state’s position against bias-motivated crimes clear.
Nearly every state has a hate crime statue, but they vary in whom and to what extent they protect.
Currently, almost all states protect against hate crimes based on race, ethnicity and religion (44), while over half protect against hate crimes based on gender (27), sexual orientation (31) and disability (31). The District of Columbia protects against all these categories of hate crimes.
Many states now include transgender people in their hate crime protections.
Ten states (CA, CO, CT, HI, MD, MN, MO, NM, PA, VT) and the District of Columbia now include gender identity in their hate crime laws. Both Colorado and Maryland strengthened their hate crime laws in 2005 by including gender identity.
States need to enact hate crimes statutes if they do not already have them, or amend existing statutes to offer better protection to their residents.
Model hate crime legislation includes four provisions:
  • Increasing penalties for crimes against people or property when the victim’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or disability motivates the underlying offense.
  • Allowing hate crime victims to sue for civil damages.
  • Collecting data on hate crime incidents.
  • Training police on how to recognize, respond to, and report such crimes.

This policy summary relies in large part on information from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign.

Endnotes
  1. Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Hate Crimes Reported by Victims and Police,” November 2005.
  2. Jessica Xavier, “Final Report of the Washington DC Transgender Needs Assessment Survey,” Administration for HIV and AIDS, Department of Health of the District of Columbia, 2000.
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