According to a Federal Bureau of Investigations report released this week, there was only one hate crime motivated by an individual’s sexual orientation last year in Pennsylvania — and it was not the highly publicized gay bashing in Center City Philadelphia.
The sole sexual orientation-motivated incident included in the FBI’s 2014 Hate Crimes Statistics report occurred in University Park, Pa. in the first half of the year. Overall, law-enforcement agencies in Pennsylvania reported 50 bias incidents in 2014. In 2013, the state reported 64 incidents, eight of which were antigay in nature.
In addition to the one reported antigay incident in 2014, 34 were related to race, eight to religion and seven to ethnicity. There were no reported bias incidents regarding disability, gender or gender identity in Pennsylvania last year.
As PGN previously reported, Philadelphia Police did not report the Sept. 11, 2014, attack on two local gay men as a bias-motivated crime to Pennsylvania State Police. Although sexual orientation and gender identity are not included as protected classes in the state’s hate-crimes law, local police departments are required to report confirmed bias incidents to state authorities on a monthly basis. That information is then passed on to the FBI for inclusion in its annual report, which was released Tuesday.
Notably, 1,457 Pennsylvania agencies participated in the reporting process, the highest number across the nation, by far. However, only 22 of those agencies reported bias incidents.
Conversely, 509 New Jersey agencies participated, and 126 of those reported 336 incidents.
Nationally, there were 5,462 single-bias incidents in 2014, down from 5,928 the previous year. Of the 2014 incidents, race was the primary motivating factor (47 percent), followed by sexual orientation (18.6 percent) and religion (18.6 percent). Gender-identity-related incidents accounted for 1.8 percent of the crimes.
Of the sexual-orientation-related incidents, 58 percent were classified as anti-gay male, 23.6 percent as anti-LGBT, 14.3 percent as anti-lesbian, and 2.6 percent as anti-bisexual. About 1.5 percent were categorized as anti-heterosexual.
Of gender-identity-related incidents, 63.3 percent were classified as anti-transgender and 36.6 percent as anti-gender-nonconforming.