No hate crimes here?

Activists wonder

Milwaukee may be a nice place to live overall; but is it a paradise in which hate crimes seldom or never occur?

You might think it is to judge from statistics furnished by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and compiled and tabulated by the Washington, D.C., office of the Anti-Defamation League.

Or you might think — as do some ADL officials, according to a recent article by Washington columnist James D. Besser — that there is something “egregiously deficient” in the reporting of hate crimes in Milwaukee, as well as in Honolulu, Buffalo, Detroit, Baltimore and Washington itself.

The FBI’s report on crime in the United States in the year 2002, released last month, included information about hate crimes furnished by some 12,000 of the 17,000 law enforcement agencies throughout the country.

The ADL created a table showing the numbers of hate crimes in the country’s 50 largest cities (largest by population within the cities themselves, excluding their suburban areas). Milwaukee ranks 19 on this table; and it didn’t even file a report on hate crimes for 2002. It did report three hate crimes for 2001, one in 2000 and one in 1999.

Sounds good, no? But Boston, city number 20 on the ADL table, reported 133 hate crimes in 2002, 212 in 2001 and 177 in 2000. Seattle, number 24 on the chart, reported 18 hate crimes in 2002, 27 in 2001 and 21 in 2000. Even in Wisconsin itself, Madison, which is not on the top 50 list, reported 17 hate crimes in 2002.

In fact, according to Michael Lieberman, counsel for the ADL’s Washington office, Milwaukee was “the largest city in the country that did not participate in the effort” to collect hate crime statistics in 2002. And this makes him wonder.

“There’s an obvious disconnect somewhere,” Lieberman said in a telephone interview. “The ADL is definitely concerned about it.”

So are local activists. Paula Simon, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, said she finds it “extremely troubling” that no or few hate crimes were reported from Milwaukee for the last few years.

While this has not so far affected the Jewish community directly, Simon said she has “an ongoing conversation” with Patrick Flaherty, director of community relations at Milwaukee’s Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender Community Center about this topic.
Flaherty has mentioned to Simon “a couple of cases” in which homosexual people were victimized, but the offenders were not charged with hate crimes.

“Are there no hate crimes?” Simon asked. “Are there hate crimes but are the perpetrators not being charged with the enhanced penalties [called for by Wisconsin and federal hate crimes laws]?… We have to figure out what causes the lack of reporting.”

Michael H. Blumenfeld, director of the Wisconsin Jewish Conference, said, “My sense in general in that reporting [of hate crimes] is not as good as it could be.

“Citizens are not reporting as much as they should. Local law enforcement is inconsistent in how they end up defining [hate crimes].”

Or a prosecution may begin with a district attorney seeking to impose the enhanced penalty for a hate crime, but “through the court system or a plea bargain, that goes away,” and the case is no longer counted as a hate crime, Blumenfeld said.

By press time, The Chronicle was unable to obtain comment from the Milwaukee Police Department or from the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Center in West Virginia, where law enforcement agencies send their crime statistics.

Blumenfeld and Lieberman said that neither the state nor federal hate crimes laws require law enforcement agencies to keep such statistics; in fact, said Lieberman, even the non-hate crimes figures are shared voluntarily and not by law with the FBI.

Deputy Inspector Sherry Warichak of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s office did tell The Chronicle that her agency would include hate crimes in its statistical reports to the FBI; but “it would not be usual for us to have to investigate a crime of this type” because they are usually reported to the police departments of the county’s municipalities.

Nevertheless, Simon said that she believes “there are some concerns at the county level” about this matter. She said the county courthouse is assembling a team, which she has been invited to join, that has applied to attend a session in January of the National Institutes Against Hate Crimes and Terrorism.

These four-day sessions take place at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and receive support from the U.S. Department of Justice. They seek to help judicial, legal, law enforcement and community relations professionals combat hate crimes and terrorism. If she attends, Simon said she would make the reporting question “a personal issue.”