The number of hate crimes, including those motivated by victims’ sexual orientation, rose nationwide last year but dropped in Pennsylvania.
The FBI released its 2008 Hate Crimes Statistics late last month and found a 2-percent increase in the total number of bias-motivated incidents, from 7,624 to 7,783 from 2007-08.
In 2007, there were 1,265 incidents stemming from the victims’ sexual orientation, while last year 1,297 were reported.
There were 68 hate-crime incidents in Pennsylvania last year, compared with 83 the previous year. In 2008, there were six crimes motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation, while the majority stemmed from race — 43, and religion —14 — with five incidents motivated by the victim’s ethnicity. In 2007, race was also the top motivating factor, followed by religion and then sexual orientation, which spurred 13 hate crimes.
Nationally, of the nearly 1,300 incidents of sexual-orientation bias, 58.6 percent were against gay men and 12 percent against lesbians, while 25.7 percent were categorized as “anti-homosexual,” 2 percent as “anti-heterosexual” and 1.7 motivated by the victims’ bisexuality, statistics that were on par with the previous year.
Of the six LGBT hate crimes reported in Pennsylvania last year, two occurred in Philadelphia, while one each took place in Pittsburgh, Pike County, Patton Township and Middletown.
Pennsylvania had 1,241 agencies participating in the data collection — including city police districts, state police, university security and other organizations — the most out of any state; however, only 31 agencies reported a hate crime had occurred within their jurisdictions in 2008. The Keystone State ranked in the bottom half of the country in terms of number of hate-crime incidences, at number 26.
Steve Glassman, chair of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, surmised the actual number of hate crimes could be far higher than the FBI reported.
“I don’t think they’re reliable statistics,” he said. “The FBI has notoriously underreported hate crimes, and many people in the field believe that the FBI numbers are only the tip of the iceberg.”
The FBI report is compiled from data volunteered by state and local agencies, and Glassman noted the voluntary nature — coupled with the lack of statewide LGBT-inclusive hate-crimes laws in many states, like Pennsylvania — could skew data.
“If you don’t have police, sheriffs or law-enforcement officials categorizing crimes as hate crimes at the scene and bringing that back to the district attorneys, you’re going to get tremendous underreporting. In Pennsylvania, we don’t have a hate-crimes law in place that provides LGBT protections, so there’s very, very little voluntary reporting of such crimes, even in local jurisdictions that have sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in their laws.”
The Commonwealth Court here ruled in 2007 to strike sexual orientation and gender identity, among other classes, from the state’s hate-crimes law, a ruling upheld by the state Supreme Court the following year. The courts found that the method by which those classifications were added to the law in 2002 — as an amendment to an agricultural bill — was unconstitutional.
There are new bills in the state Senate and House to re-extend hate-crimes protections to the LGBT community, the latter of which was recently approved by a bipartisan committee vote and expected to come to the full House floor early next year.
In October, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act as an amendment to a defense-authorization bill. The law incorporates sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under the federal hate-crimes law, provides funding for state and local agencies to investigate hate crimes and expands the federal government’s jurisdiction over such crimes.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].