Hoehn was charged with and later pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges in Indiana. A few months later, Maurice Diggins was convicted by a federal jury of a 2018 hate crime for breaking the jaw of a Sudanese man in Maine while shouting racial epithets.

The first use of the term “hate crime” in federal legislation was the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990. This was not a criminal statute but rather a data-gathering requirement that mandated that the U.S. attorney general collect information on crimes that “evidenced prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.”

Soon, states began passing their own laws recognizing bias crimes. But hate crime legislation has not led to many charges and convictions.

Law enforcement officers struggle to identify hate crime and prosecute offenders. Even though 48 states have hate crime laws, 88% of law enforcement agencies, including local and state police departments, reported to the FBI that not a single hate crime had occurred in their jurisdictionin 2020.

I’ve found that police departments are rarely organized in a way that allows them to develop the expertise necessary to effectively investigate hate crimes. When police departments have specialized police units and prosecutors who are committed to taking on hate crime, they can develop the routines that allow them to investigate hate crime in a manner that supports victims.

In the late 1990s, I studied a specialized police hate crime unit in a city I called, for the purposes of anonymity, “Center City.” My book revealed that those detectives could distinguish non-hate crimes – for instance, when the perpetrator angrily used the n-word in a fight – from cases that are truly hate crimes, as when the perpetrator used it during a targeted attack on a Black person.

Without the right training and organizational structure, officers are unclear about common markers of bias motivation, and tend to assume that they must go to extraordinary lengths to figure out why suspects committed the crime.

Advocates for hate crime victims maintain that police and prosecutors can do much more to identify and punish hate crimes.

Empirical evidence supports their claims. The FBI’s 2019 report contains 8,559 bias crimes reported by law enforcement agencies. But in the National Crime Victimization Survey, victims say that they experienced, on average, more than 200,000 hate crimes each year. This suggests that police are missing many hate crimes that have occurred.

Distrust of police, especially in Black communities, may dissuade minorities from even calling the police when they are victimized by a hate crime for fear they could also become victims of police violence.

All this means that perpetrators of hate crimes may not be caught and can re-offend, further victimizing communities that are meant to be protected by hate crime laws.

Hate crime laws reflect American ideals of fairness, justice and equity. But if crimes motivated by bias aren’t reported, well investigated, charged or brought to trial, it matters little what state law says.

Editor’s note: This story incorporates material from an earlier story published on March 19, 2021.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Jeannine Bell, Loyola University Chicago. The Conversation has a variety of fascinating free newsletters.

Read more:
What is a hate crime? The narrow legal definition makes it hard to charge and convict

What the latest FBI data do and do not tell us about hate crimes in the US

Jeannine Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.