SUMMARY: According to the FBI, hate crimes are on the rise in the U.S. Studies also suggest white nationalist and white supremacist ideologies are spreading. Derek Black was raised in a household that espoused such beliefs, but during college, his views gradually evolved. Special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks with Black about his journey and the best way to help others find a similar path.
SUMMARY: At least 22 people were killed when a gunman opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso on Saturday. The alleged shooter referenced white supremacist ideology in a manifesto posted online shortly before the massacre. Judy Woodruff talks to William Brangham, reporting from El Paso on why the violence is so “jarring” in a largely welcoming and harmonious community adjacent to the U.S. border with Mexico.
SUMMARY: Less than 24 hours after a shooting massacre in El Paso, another nine people were gunned down in a busy nightlife area of Dayton, Ohio, early Sunday morning. Police quickly killed the alleged gunman. Judy Woodruff talks to Yamiche Alcindor, reporting from Dayton on how stunned residents are coping with the tragedy, what they think is causing the violence and the political change they want to see.
SUMMARY: On Wednesday, President Trump traveled to Dayton, Ohio, where a gunman killed nine people and wounded 26 early Sunday morning. Ahead of his visit, Mayor Nan Whaley expressed concerns about the President’s previous rhetoric and said she hoped his visit would “add value” to the grieving community. Whaley joins William Brangham to discuss what she told Trump about her stricken city and gun safety.
SUMMARY: President Trump visited grieving El Paso Wednesday. An “El Paso Strong” rally was held to coincide with his arrival -- and protest his rhetoric on race and immigration. Judy Woodruff talks to Dan Bush, reporting from El Paso, about the mood in the “deeply divided” city, how residents felt about the President’s visit, Trump’s agenda while in town and what Sen. Ted Cruz [R-Tx] said on the somber occasion.
Guilty pleas last week by two prominent members of the Rise Above Movement [RAM] came after pledges to fight federal charges and claims that those jailed were political prisoners punished for their controversial views.
This story was co-published with Frontline PBS.
Last year, when federal authorities arrested and charged four members or associates of a white supremacist gang for their roles in the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the men and their supporters struck a defiant tone.
The men proclaimed their innocence, and their backers described them in social media posts as “patriots” and “political prisoners.” The gang, known as the Rise Above Movement and based in Southern California, set up an anonymous tip line for people to share evidence that might exonerate the imprisoned members, and it established a legal defense fund, with donations taken via PayPal and bitcoin.
But in the following months, the men, one after the other, have pleaded guilty. Last Friday saw the final two guilty pleas, including one from Ben Daley, 26, one of the group’s leaders. He was joined by Michael Miselis, 30, a former Northrop Grumman aerospace engineer. The men pleaded guilty to conspiracy to riot.
“These avowed white supremacists traveled to Charlottesville to incite and commit acts of violence, not to engage in peaceful First Amendment expression,” U.S. Attorney Thomas T. Cullen said in announcing the guilty pleas. “Although the First Amendment protects an organization’s right to express abhorrent political views, it does not authorize senseless violence in furtherance of a political agenda.”
The Rise Above Movement and its role in the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 and at rallies in other cities was the subject of reporting by ProPublica and Frontline, work the authorities have credited in taking action against the men. Federal prosecutors in California are pursuing charges against four other RAM members, including its founder, Robert Rundo.
The plea documents filed during Friday’s court proceedings in Charlottesville lay out a detailed narrative of what the authorities say were RAM’s repeated acts of violence two years ago.
The narrative chronicles RAM’s combat training and the visual evidence capturing its members attacking protesters, including in Charlottesville, where, the authorities spell out, they “collectively pushed, punched, kicked, choked, head-butted, and otherwise assaulted several individuals, resulting in a riot.”
In pleading guilty, the authorities said, Daley and Miselis admitted their actions were not in self-defense.
In the contemporary white supremacist scene, RAM had positioned itself as the violent vanguard of the movement, a successor to the volatile and hyper-aggressive skinhead gangs that were prevalent during the 1980s and 1990s. Since its formation in 2016, the group has recruited several members of the Hammerskin Nation, the largest skinhead gang in the country, which has been tied to numerous killings, including the massacre of six Sikh worshippers at a temple outside Milwaukee.
Though RAM has eschewed the skinhead style — combat boots and bomber jackets — in favor of a more mainstream look, its members have embraced the bloody tactics of the Nazi skinhead gangs.
Miselis, a onetime engineering student at UCLA, was fired from his job at Northrop Grumman after ProPublica and Frontline exposed his membership in RAM. In a companywide email, then-CEO Wesley Bush said he was “deeply saddened yesterday to see news reports alleging that one of our employees engaged in violence as part of the Charlottesville protests.” Miselis held a government-issued security clearance while at Northrop, a major defense contractor, though the company has so far declined to say what projects Miselis was assigned to.
Rundo, who was living in Orange County at the time of his arrest, has also portrayed the federal prosecutions as a miscarriage of justice. “The rioting charges brought against us have not been used in 70 years,” Rundo said in a jailhouse interview posted on YouTube in February. “This has little to do with rioting and all to do with censorship and silencing anyone that they deem too radical by today’s standards.”
In the interview, Rundo blamed the media for demonizing RAM and described the group as a self-improvement club for white men.
Rundo has pleaded not guilty, and he could be headed to trial.
The RAM prosecutions have become something of a cause celebre for the racist right. Augustus Invictus, a fringe political figure and attorney, has set up a legal defense fund to solicit donations for the RAM members facing charges. “The federal government has taken an absolute political hard line against the right wing,” Invictus said in a 53-minute YouTube video discussing the case. The video has generated more than 22,000 views and nearly 700 comments, most of them sympathetic to RAM and many of them racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic.
One of RAM’s most infamous supporters is Robert Bowers, the Pennsylvania man accused of murdering 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last October. Shortly before the massacre, Bowers posted a message decrying the RAM prosecutions on Gab, a far-right social media platform. Bowers has pleaded not guilty in the unfolding case.
SUMMARY: The deadly weekend shooting at a San Diego synagogue appears to be the latest in a series of hate-driven domestic terror attacks across the U.S. This time, the killer left a manifesto praising other recent assaults. How is the Trump administration responding, and is it enough to quell the growing threat? Amna Nawaz talks to Nick Rasmussen of the McCain Institute for International Leadership.
SUMMARY: President Trump called Saturday’s synagogue shooting anti-Semitic and “an assault on humanity.” But a chorus of voices argues that the President himself has fostered a national atmosphere of hatred. William Brangham speaks with Jonathan Greenblatt head of the Anti-Defamation League, and historian Deborah Lipstadt about social media's role as an amplifier and politicians who "embolden" violence.
SUMMARY: A doctor known for compassionate care of HIV patients early in the AIDS crisis. A “vivacious” 97-year-old. Brothers who “looked out for one another.” A new grandfather. A youth baseball coach. A dentist who volunteered at free clinics. For Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, Tuesday marked the beginning of shiva, a somber seven days of mourning for the 11 people killed in Saturday's synagogue shooting.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the series of pipe bombs, extreme political divisions in America and campaigning on issues vs. values.
Judy Woodruff (NewsHour): Let's move beyond West Virginia for a look at this moment in American politics with the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That's syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
And welcome to you both.
So, clearly, a lot of relief that the suspect has been arrested in connection with these pipe bombs.
It turns out, Mark, that this is somebody who is a big supporter of President Trump. We don't know much more than that at this point. He is a suspect.
But what does this say about this moment in American politics?
Mark Shields, syndicated columnist: Well, what it says, Judy, I think, more than anything, not knowing the suspect, other than what I have read, is that Donald Trump is a different, sui generis kind of President.
We Americans are used a President, in a time of crisis or tragedy putting aside any partisan hat.
Ronald Reagan, at the time of Challenger, speaking of the deaths of the astronauts, saying they broke the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God, I mean, it healed a nation. It reached out to a nation.
That is missing from Mr. Trump. In fact, this morning at 3:00 in the morning — it's 3:00 a.m. Do you know where your President is? Our President was tweeting and lamenting the fact that all this bomb talk had interfered with the Republicans' early voting and had changed the political dialogue.
So, I mean, I think that's what we have learned. And it's confirming, and at the same time upsetting.
Judy Woodruff: David, what do you make of how the President's talked about this, handled all this?
David Brooks, New York Times: Well, in the last 24 hours, he's been OK. He said it's a despicable act and called for unity.
But that's following three years of friend-enemy distinctions, of us-them thinking. And it's not only Republicans. I mean, when Steve Scalise was shot, that was somebody from the left.
But we have just entered a world — and it's been increasing over the years, and I would say Donald Trump is the exclamation point of it — (A) is treating politics as a war to the death between two sides and that, for the country move forward, you need to destroy the other side.
And that's not what politics is. It's competition between partial truths, competing value systems. And then the second thing (B) is, politics for some people has become their identity for them.
This guy's truck or his van just was covered with these stickers, some of them with crosshairs on Democratic figures. And that's when — if you try to make politics your idol, you're asking politics to bear more than it can bear. And you're headed for an ugly place.
And so we have entered a spot where we have got these Manichaean distinctions, and then we have also got people catastrophizing, if the other side wins, then the country's off to ruin. And neither of those things are true.
Judy Woodruff: And, Mark, I mean, again, we don't want to make more of this than what we know.
But there does seem to be — this seems to be a moment of particular vitriol out on the campaign trail. To some extent, it's the way the President has talked about this caravan of people coming up through Mexico, migrants from Central America.
And there have been other steps that Republican politicians and Democratic politicians have taken to stir people up. I mean, are there any guardrails right now?
Mark Shields: Well, Judy, the terrible part about our politics is that the dominant rule is, if it works, emulate or try to simulate it.
And I think — right now, I'm in Ohio. And I think the Senate race is a perfect example of that. Jim Renacci, the congressman, won the Republican nomination by almost behaving like a mini-Trump, but he can't — he's going to be beaten quite badly by Senator Sherrod Brown because there's only one Trump.
I mean, Donald Trump has been doing this for 25 years. He's practiced at it. But make no mistake about it. There will be knockoff Trumps. There will be people trying to do it. There will be Democrats trying to say, this is the way to do it. And it does — it does work, until it doesn't work.
And I think it's not working, quite frankly, when the President refuses to accept the responsibility Ronald Reagan laid down, that Bill Clinton did after Oklahoma City, that George W. Bush did in the wreckage of 9/11 with the first-responders, that to heal a nation and to reach out to the other side, to offer an arm around the shoulder, rather than pointing a finger of blame.
Judy Woodruff: And, David, I mean, whether it's a negative or a positive, we have polling results that remind us again how much President Trump is a factor in these elections.
We look back. This was the "NewsHour"/NPR/Marist poll. We look back at how much people said President Obama was a factor in 2014 — 28 percent said he was a major factor, compared to 44 percent for President Trump today. We're in a different time.
David Brooks: Yes. And those numbers are low. People don't want to admit they're actually voting on the President, when, in fact, they are.
And so I would say it's 80 percent is really who Trump is. And he represents a fundamental shift in what the country, how the country sees itself, how we see our foreign policy, how we see our identity. He's [Trump] a very talented cultural poker.
And so a lot of identity issues, a lot of cultural issues are poked by the way he talks about the caravan, the way he talks about men, the way he talks about women, the way talks about race. And so he's presented really a fundamental challenge, first taking over the Republican Party, and a challenge to the way either party has defined the country and defined themselves in defined morality, basically.
And so he is sort of this revolutionary force, and so it's not surprising the election would really revolve around him. I think it's a mistake, personally, that the Democrats are countering him by running on health care, on preexisting conditions and some of the Obamacare benefits.
I think the Democrats constantly make a mistake where they say, we can win elections by offering people material benefits, and then they don't understand why they lose the working class, because they say, what's the matter with Kansas? We offered these people these benefits and they didn't vote for us.
It's because most people vote on culture and identity, not on material benefits. So when the Democrats go to materialism, and Donald Trump is doing culture, I think it's playing more into his hands, because there's no response.
SUMMARY: Federal agents are investigating bomb scares targeting prominent Democrats, as well as CNN. Amna Nawaz reports on the political discourse that may have inspired it, as well as President Trump’s response. Hari Sreenivasan reports from New York. Judy Woodruff discusses with Juliette Kayyem who worked in the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, and Joseph Funk former Secret Service.
SUMMARY: Three more mail bombs were intercepted today: two in Delaware, addressed to former Vice President Joe Biden, and another sent to Robert De Niro’s New York City office. After President Trump blamed the "hateful" media for stoking national tensions, former CIA director John Brennan (himself a bomb target) shot back, criticizing the President's rhetoric as "fuel" for violence. Amna Nawaz reports.
SUMMARY: Authorities arrested a 56-year-old Florida resident in connection with a series of mail bombs sent to prominent Democratic politicians and public figures. Cesar Sayoc faces up to 48 years in prison on multiple federal charges. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Trump both hailed the arrest, promising Sayoc would be prosecuted to the “fullest extent of the law.” Amna Nawaz reports.
SUMMARY: Now that a Florida man has been arrested and charged in the series of mail bombs over the past week, we turn to considering his motives. What do we know about the relationship between ideological extremism and violent behavior? And how does social media play in? Judy Woodruff talks with Mary McCord former acting assistant attorney general, and J.M. Berger author of "Extremism,” for analysis.
SUMMARY: On Saturday morning, a man opened fire during a naming ceremony at Tree of Life Congregation, a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and killed 11 people while injuring six, including four police officers. Law enforcement took into custody a man they identified as Robert Bowers. Executive Editor David Shribman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette joins Hari Sreenivasan for more.
SUMMARY: Cesar Sayoc, who was arrested on Friday on suspicion of sending more than a dozen mail bombs to Democratic party leaders, traversed many lifestyles until he started engaging in politics in 2015. Trevor Aaronson of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting sifted public records and talked to people who knew Sayoc, and he tells Hari Sreenivasan what he found.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, including President Donald Trump’s efforts to energize Republicans ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, accusations of voter suppression in Georgia, and the state of U.S.-Saudi relations after a Saudi journalist’s alleged murder.
Judy Woodruff (NewsHour): We turn now to another busy week of news.
With just over three weeks to go until the crucial midterm elections, President Trump is headlining rallies almost daily across the country, hammering Democrats, and trying to energize Republicans to get to the polls.
A cue for the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Hello to both of you. It's Friday.
So we do have the President, it seems, out on the campaign trail every single day, jetting out to whether it's Tennessee or Pennsylvania or another part of the country.
Today, Mark, he is in Ohio trying to energize the Republican vote, the base, trying to get them out. Is it working, do you think?
Mark Shields, syndicated columnist: Republicans feel it's working better than it did two or three weeks ago, Judy.
But I think what is remarkable about it is how constant it is. You said about energizing the base. It's about inflaming people. Donald Trump's message is never about forging a coalition, reaching across the divide, trying to enlist the majority. It's always about coming back to, it's us against them, and we may not be perfect, but, boy, those other guys are really bad.
And I think that's the message. It's going to be a referendum, as it is every midterm, on the President. And his numbers right now are just about the same point where Barack Obama's were in 2010, when the Democrats suffered enormous defeat, Bill Clinton's in '94, when the Democrats suffered a big defeat, and 2006, George Bush's, when the Republicans lost control of the Congress.
Judy Woodruff: But you do have the President, David, out talking about Democrats are part of an angry mob, calling them evil, I mean, using some of the strongest language he has used.
Is that likely to get his base even more fired up?
David Brooks, New York Times: Yap. Ya.
(LAUGHTER)
David Brooks: I think it's working.
We're in an age of negative polarization. And that means you don't have to like your own party. You just have to hate the other one. And that means it's all about contempt. And has the other side made you appalled? Have they made you feel contemptuous?
And one thing the Kavanaugh hearing has done is, it made both sides feel the other is appalling. And so that has fired up both bases. And the effect is — and it's always worth reminding ourselves that we no longer having one election anymore. We have a red state election and a blue state election.
And they're increasingly disconnected. And so the odds are looking pretty good. The polls have been shifting in a Republican way on the Senate side in all those red states, Texas, Montana, and those places. And the Senate is looking more secure as of this moment.
The House is looking more endangered for the Republicans at this moment, as suburban women move over to the Democratic side. So we have two different elections. And there seems to be pretty strong momentum in opposite directions.
Judy Woodruff: How are Democrats countering this, I mean, this approach by the President, Mark?
There's this couple of polls, including the one we did with Marist and NPR this week, that came out showed, yes, the enthusiasm gap has narrowed. It was the Democrats who were more energized. And, indeed, Republican seem to be more energized.
What — how to Democrats come back?
Mark Shields: Well, the first thing they ought to do is stop picketing and stop boycotting and organize.
I mean, the most Democratic group in the entire electorate of voters is age 18 to 35. And they live everywhere. They aren't concentrated in certain districts, like perhaps African-American or Latinos are. They are everywhere. And if they vote, the Democrats will win big.
I will say this. I think the most encouraging sign for the Democrats is, the Democrats do have a national macro message in this campaign. It's about checks and balances on the President. It's not a new message, but it's a message that certainly resonates with an awful lot of voters.
It's about preserving the strength of health care, particularly the preexisting condition provision. But, most of all, I think it's contrast with the Republicans, who don't have a national message. They really don't. They're running micro campaigns.
In one camp — one district, it's you double parked, and you got several parking tickets, or you were late on your library books, or you missed your mother's birthday. I mean, they're running very personal campaigns in a very micro sense. I think that's good.
The final thing I would say is, look at the governor's races, the governor's races across the country, if you really want to see which way the country's going. They're going blue. They're not — they're not going red.
When you have got Democrats competitive in places like Oklahoma and Kansas and South Dakota, which they are right as we speak here tonight, then there's a possibility of the Democrats sweeping that entire belt from the Midwest all the way to the East Coast.
Judy Woodruff: We did hear, David, Al Gore, saying — talking about checks and balances, that that's a good motivating thing for Democrats.
But what about that? I mean, is — are we seeing Democrats united in some way, in some — in a message that they're…
David Brooks: Yes, unity is not any parties' problem right now. They're both — they're all pretty unified.
To me, one of the — an interesting debate is happening — you could call it the Michelle Obama-Hillary Clinton debate. And when Michelle Obama famously said, when they go low, we will go high, and she's sticking to that. And Hillary Clinton says, no, they are going low, we got to go low too.
And you see that debate. I think, in this age, having the moral high ground is a bit of an advantage, a major advantage. And because of Donald Trump's behavior, he has put the Republicans at a moral disadvantage.
And keeping go — staying high, staying reasonably civil, not totally going into the gutter with Donald Trump strikes me as the right Democratic strategy and the right strategy for any movement, because once you go down there, you self-corrupt.
And so I — one begins to see — Eric Holder said, if they go after us, we kick them. You're beginning to see a lot of people getting so angry about Kavanaugh and other things, any means necessary. To me, that is a mistake just for the soul of your party.
Judy Woodruff: I mean…
Mark Shields: Let me say, I agree with David.
I think it's not only the right thing to do, but the wise thing to do. I think it's in the best interests of the country. And I would say, at a practical level, you can't compete with Donald Trump. He's just better at it than anybody else.
Judy Woodruff: Better at what?
Mark Shields: Better at finding, identifying the weakness or shortcoming of his opponent, and then exploiting it.
It is a major talent. He did it serially to each of his Republican challenges in 2016. He did it to Secretary Clinton in the election. And that's really what makes this midterm election. He is searching for an opponent that he can do the same thing.
David Brooks: Yes. And the politics he specializes in is, I don't really like those kind of people.
Like, we used to have debates about health care, about economic policy, about foreign policy. Now it's just, those people are really bad. Those people who say you're bad, actually, they're the bad ones.
And that's a style of politics. Somehow, we have gotten away from issues. And the governor's races are — maybe that's a third electorate, because the governor's races tend to be a little more about issues. And they are swinging to the Democrats.
SUMMARY: In “The Hate U Give,” Amandla Stenberg plays teen Starr Carter who witnesses a white officer kill her best friend. Carter struggles to grieve and find her voice while navigating her poor, mostly black neighborhood and her mostly white prep school. Jeffrey Brown talks to Stenberg, director George Tillman Jr. and author Angie Thomas who wrote the best-selling book on which the film is based.
ProPublica sent public-records requests to more than 50 police departments that reported anti-heterosexual hate crimes to the FBI. None of the reports we could track down actually included evidence of hate crimes against straight people.
Rob heard a loud knock at his door late one night in August 2014. His landlord had been calling him about maintenance issues in his Columbus, Ohio, apartment, but that night she came with a male companion and began to scream at him. According to a police report, the man jumped into the argument and threatened Rob — who asked that we not use his full name — with a homophobic slur. Fearing an escalation, he called the police.
“A thing that I’ve dealt with my entire life as a gay man is extreme prejudice, from threats to constant harassment,” Rob said, noting that his landlord had previously told his neighbors that he was a “filthy queer.”
Columbus police acknowledged Rob’s concern that the incident may have been motivated by bias, but they got a key detail wrong in their incident report: They mistakenly marked it as a case of anti-heterosexual harassment.
Since 2010, Columbus police have reported six incidents that list bias against heterosexuals as the purported motivation. That’s more than any other local law enforcement agency in the nation reported during that period. Columbus Police Department Sgt. Dean Worthington acknowledges it’s likely that the officers who filed the reports marked the wrong box.
“Given the fact that our officers are human, we are prone to make the occasional mistake,” said Worthington. “I can assure you these mistakes were not intentional.”
Each officer has a supervisor whose duty is to check such reports, but it’s possible the errors still got through, Worthington added.
Those reports made their way from Columbus to Washington, D.C., where they were compiled with thousands of others into what the FBI calls the Uniform Crime Report. Every year a small number of anti-heterosexual hate crime reports end up in the UCR. From 2010 to 2016, the FBI reported that local law enforcement agencies noted a total of 142 of them.
ProPublica reviewed dozens of these reports, however, and found few, if any, actual hate crimes targeting people for being heterosexual.
We sent Freedom of Information Act requests to every law enforcement agency that reported a heterosexual bias crime in 2016 — the most recent year for which FBI data was available. We also sent requests to every agency that had reported two or more such crimes since 2010, as well as to any agency available in an online service used to send public-records requests called Muckrock.
In total, we were able to locate records for 58 cases.
None described hate crimes spurred by anti-heterosexual bias. As with the case in Columbus, about half were actually anti-gay or anti-bisexual crimes that were miscategorized. Seven cases appeared to reflect other types of bias, with victims targeted because they were Jewish or black or women. Some 18 cases don’t seem to have been hate crimes at all, containing no discernible bias element.
The findings reflect a larger problem: Many local law enforcement agencies do a poor job tracking hate crimes. It’s a problem that can endanger public safety and leave policy makers blind when grappling with the growing problem of hate crimes and bias incidents in America.
Rob says he was discouraged from pressing charges against his landlord due to a lack of witnesses present. The police filled out an incident report but he decided not to pursue it further, in part because he feared reprisal from his landlord. When he found out from ProPublica that the police had marked the report wrong, he said it felt like yet another slight.
“It’s just sad to hear because I know she was targeting me for being a gay man,” he said.
As ProPublica reported last year, when asked for hate crimes data, many police departments said they hadn’t investigated any hate incidents, had no records on file, or that their records were poorly kept. Some police departments don’t mark bias-motivated crimes as such, or officers aren’t sure of how to mark hate crimes within their record systems.
ProPublica found that many of the anti-LGBTQ crimes mismarked as anti-heterosexual were vandalism and involved the use of a common anti-gay slur. Even Palm Springs, California — which has one of the highest proportion of same-sex couples in the country, according to a census analysis by UCLA’s Williams Institute — misreported an anti-gay hate crime as anti-heterosexual.
In a few cases, victims were straight but were targeted by suspects who believed them to be gay. Even in cases of mistaken identity, the FBI instructs police to mark the perceived bias of the aggressor — in these cases, as anti-LGBTQ. In Columbus, Ohio, a straight man was called a “faggot” before he was assaulted. The report, however, indicated that the attack was motivated by anti-heterosexual bias. In Gainesville, Florida, a straight woman and her female roommate were targeted, police correctly marked it as an anti-lesbian hate crime on the incident report, but it was reflected in the FBI’s data as an anti-heterosexual incident. Officials weren’t sure why.
In the FBI’s bias codes system, 44 is the code for an anti-heterosexual crime, while 41 is the code for an anti-gay male hate crime, making such a mistake a matter of a single digit. Several police departments pointed to drop-down menus and online tracking systems as the reason behind mislabeling.
For example, San Leandro, California, reported three anti-heterosexual hate crimes to the FBI between 2014 and 2016. Judy Park, the department’s records supervisor, acknowledged that all three were in fact anti-gay hate crimes. She said the cases had been added to the department’s internal system correctly, but the computer software had extracted the bias code number wrong — showing a 44 (anti-heterosexual) instead of a 41 (anti-gay male) on the incident reports. Park said she would work with the software vendor to fix the problem and try to correct the mistake with the FBI. “Thank you for bringing it to our attention, because we never would have known,” she added.
Officials from five other police departments — Tehachapi, California; Evesham and Princeton, New Jersey; Columbus, Ohio; and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville — also said they would work to correct such errors with state or federal agencies.
In some cases, police reports obtained by ProPublica showed no indication of a bias motivation in the description of the crime.
A number of these cases involved thefts, robberies and credit card fraud. In Benton, Kentucky, a few days before Christmas 2016, a suspect walked out of a Walmart with a shopping cart full of stolen merchandise, including drones, a scooter and a video game controller, according to Benton Police Chief Jeremy Hicks. He acknowledged the case was mistakenly mislabeled as an anti-heterosexual hate crime.
The erroneous reports suggest that the FBI is undercounting anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, which represent a significant portion of U.S. bias crimes. The FBI’s 2016 hate crimes report showed that sexual orientation-based bias crimes were the third most common hate crimes. The vast majority of those targeted victims for being gay, lesbian or bisexual. According to a National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs report, 2016 was “the deadliest year on record” for the LGBTQ community.
A statement from the FBI was unavailable at press time. We will update this story once we receive it.
To be sure, hate crimes against heterosexual people are possible. Federal law lists “sexual orientation” as a category of hate crimes, and a crime perpetrated against somebody for being straight would be a hate crime under federal law. But if there have been any of these crimes investigated or charged, it’s tough to find them in public records.
The difficulty of finding bona fide anti-heterosexual bias crimes or incidents is reflected by the lack of tips gathered by ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project. We’ve collected more than 500 tips from people who say they or someone they know was targeted because of their sexual orientation — but no tips at all from people who say they were targeted based on being heterosexual.
Anti-heterosexual hate crimes are so rare that experts working on hate crimes for years struggled to recall them, citing two cases of straight men getting assaulted at gay bars and a few attacks on religious institutions by gay activists in the 1990s.
ProPublica identified a handful of anti-heterosexual cases that fell into a gray area.
In Canton, Ohio, a yard sign opposing gay marriage was knocked over, damaging the steel posts holding it up. In Louisburg, North Carolina, signs encouraging people to vote for a state amendment to ban same-sex marriage were stolen multiple times in front of a Baptist church.
Police officials from Stark County, Ohio, and Franklin County, North Carolina, told ProPublica they weren’t sure why the incidents were reported to the FBI as prompted by anti-heterosexual bias. Experts weren’t sure how to classify these crimes, saying they could potentially reflect political or ideological bias.
Jeannine Bell, a law professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law who has studied hate crimes for more than two decades, says poor data collection indicates law enforcement agencies don’t take hate crimes seriously.
“It means that police fundamentally are not investigating hate crimes,” she said. “Hate crime needs to be more than checking a box.”
SUMMARY: The national fallout continues after three people died and multiple people were injured in the chaos of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday. The NewsHour's PJ Tobia and Mark Scialla join Hari Sreenivasan to discuss why many see the rally as a turning point, as well as to offer a look at the “Antifa” counter-protesters.
SUMMARY: Hari Sreenivasan takes a deep look at the nation's divide following Saturday's deadly incident during a white nationalist rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as what the Trump administration needs to do with Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and George Selim, a former Department of Homeland Security official.
SUMMARY: The violent events in Charlottesville, where white supremacist groups came out of the shadows, seem to have brought rising American tensions over race and racism to a head. Hari Sreenivasan gets perspectives from Leonard Pitts Jr. of The Miami Herald, Carol Anderson of Emory University, and Mark Potok a former senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
SUMMARY: As politicians and influential business leaders weigh in on President Trump's comments on Charlottesville, how is the American public responding? Political correspondent Lisa Desjardins joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss a new PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll about the clashes and the President's comments, how lawmakers of his own party are speaking out, plus Confederate statues at the Capitol.
