The percentage of hate crimes being committed against whites and Hispanics in the District is rapidly on the rise, Police Chief Cathy Lanier said Wednesday. Historically, the vast majority of hate crimes in D.C. have been based on sexual orientation, but in the past 18 months those instances have fallen to less than 50 percent of all hate crimes as racially biased crimes have accelerated. In the first half of 2011, 15 crimes (or 39 percent of all hate crimes) were racially motivated, and 14 crimes (or 36 percent of the total) were based on sexual orientation. Just two years ago, 73 percent of all hate crimes — 30 of 41 — were based on sexual orientation.
The new targets, Lanier said, “are largely Hispanic and white residents.”
| D.C. hate crimes: |
| Sexual orientation as a percentage of all hate crimes: |
| 2008: 67% |
| 2009: 73% |
| 2010: 51% |
| 2011 (first-half): 36% |
| Racial bias as percentage of all hate crimes: |
| 2008: 13% |
| 2009: 5% |
| 2010: 21% |
| 2011 (first-half): 39% |
The change could be the latest manifestation of the city’s deepening racial divide that has been fueled by the return of white, wealthy residents to the District’s boundaries and the flight of black, poorer residents to its suburbs, she said.
“It’s part of the issue we see discussed every day,” Lanier said. “It’s the changes in the city, the new versus old residents and the development areas. People who commit crimes take advantage of those areas.”
Lanier couldn’t cite specific examples of white residents being targeted. Last year, though, the department responded to a series of robberies that targeted Hispanics as they made their way home from construction sites, the chief said. The department’s Latino Liaison Unit was deployed to the neighborhoods and also met with workers at the sites to spread awareness that they were being targeted.
But the crimes might have been “motivated more by economic opportunity than bias,” Lanier noted, and that type of confusion can complicate record keeping.
For the department to count an incident as a hate crime, it must show that hate toward a particular group — racial, sexual, gender, religious or even political — must be the motivation. That makes hate crimes difficult to capture, both because it’s difficult to prove hate as a motive and because they’re underreported, officials said.
“It’s a troubling issue,” said at-large Councilman Phil Mendelson, whose public safety committee oversees the police department. “We don’t get accurate reporting because victims are reluctant to come forward and officers don’t always understand how to encourage them and make a victim comfortable to report the crime.”
