The FBI relies on local law enforcement agencies to identify and report crimes motivated by bias, but many agencies fumble this task.
In the early hours of June 5, 2015, Gary Bravo was leaving Sammy T’s
in downtown Huntsville, Alabama. The club was hosting a gay night
because the last of the city’s few gay bars had closed and some downtown
bars were picking up the slack.
As Bravo walked out with two co-workers, they encountered a group of
young men. One grabbed Bravo’s friend, and Bravo intervened. The next
thing he remembers, someone spun him around, and he was on the ground
being punched and kicked while his attackers shouted homophobic slurs.
Faggot. Cocksucker.
“A couple more hits and I would have ended up being brain dead,” he recalled.
Bravo suffered extensive injuries from the attack. His right eye was
bloodied and swollen, and he couldn’t see from it for weeks. His eye
socket had to be reconstructed.
Despite his attackers’ words during the beating, police did not
investigate it as a hate crime, or report it to state or federal
authorities as one.
Bravo’s case is just one of thousands lost each year to a deeply
flawed system for collecting hate crime data, one that has left the U.S.
with unreliable, incomplete official counts and little handle on the
true scope of bias-motivated violence.
Under a federal law passed in 1990, the FBI is required to track and
tabulate crimes in which there was “manifest evidence of prejudice”
against a host of protected groups, including homosexuals, regardless of
differences in how state laws define who’s protected. The FBI, in turn,
relies on local law enforcement agencies to collect and submit this
data, but can’t compel them to do so.
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Source: ProPublica
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