Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. Several weeks ago, the nation was shocked
Speaker 1: and horrified to hear about shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, where
Speaker 1: twenty one year old man went to three day spas
Speaker 1: or massage parlors and killed eight people. Six of the
Speaker 1: victims were of Asian origin, and many people are wondering
Speaker 1: if and whether the gunmen will be charged with committing
Speaker 1: a hate crime alongside charges of murder and aggravated assault.
Speaker 1: But hate crime charges are relatively rare and they can
Speaker 1: be challenging to prove in court. In twenty twenty, Georgia
Speaker 1: became one of the last states in the country to
Speaker 1: enact an anti hate crime That in turn raises some
Speaker 1: core questions. Why are hate crimes charges so rare? How
Speaker 1: should and do the police actually investigate and prosecute hate crime?
Speaker 1: What should we do when there are many hate crimes
Speaker 1: that may evade the legal criteria despite appearing on the
Speaker 1: surface and maybe beneath to be racially motivated. All of
Speaker 1: these are questions that connect to the theme of power,
Speaker 1: which is our central theme this year On Deep Background,
Speaker 1: they raise the question of the state's power to react
Speaker 1: to racial and other forms of bias, and of the
Speaker 1: capacity of our society more broadly, to exercise societal power
Speaker 1: over and against the power of hate. Today's guest is
Speaker 1: an expert on precisely these topics. Doctor Jeanine Bell is
Speaker 1: professor of law at Indiana University. She's a nationally recognized
Speaker 1: scholar in the area of pleasing and hate crime. She
Speaker 1: wrote a book called Policing Hatred, Law Enforcement, Civil Rights
Speaker 1: and Hate Crime, and ethnographic investigation of a big city
Speaker 1: police hate crime unit. Today, on Deep Background, she's going
Speaker 1: to talk to us about hate crimes laws, when and
Speaker 1: how they came, about how they can and should be enforced,
Speaker 1: and criticisms of those laws raised by some in the
Speaker 1: advocacy community. Professor Bell, welcome to Deep Background. Ganine, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for being here. Your topic is perennially significant,
Speaker 1: and it's also very significant in the present moment. What
Speaker 1: drew you to this particular subject of expertise and study.
Speaker 1: It's it's importance is unquestioned, and it's more fortunate that
Speaker 1: you are working on it. But what personally for you
Speaker 1: made this your focus. It's interesting, you know, and this
Speaker 1: has a lot to do with my current career as
Speaker 1: a law professor. I was a political science graduate student.
Speaker 1: It was early in nineteen nineties. I was in the
Speaker 1: dentist's office and I picked up Time magazine and they
Speaker 1: had a story about a black tourist visiting Disneyland, I believe,
Speaker 1: who had been set on fire by some whites, and
Speaker 1: they called it a hate crime. I was really surprised,
Speaker 1: you know, I was familiar with acts of racist violence,
Speaker 1: but I'd never heard any notion of hate crime. So
Speaker 1: I decided to look into it, and I looked at
Speaker 1: the literature, all of the literature about this term hate crime.
Speaker 1: It was right between rav in Wisconsin versus Mitchell and
Speaker 1: all of the legal literature. You know, law professor's writings said, Oh,
Speaker 1: this silly. Nobody knows what a hate crime is. You
Speaker 1: can never tell whether something is a hate crime or not.
Speaker 1: And this is still twenty five years later, something that
Speaker 1: is a huge portion of the First Amendment literature. We
Speaker 1: can't figure out whether something is bias motivated. So that's
Speaker 1: why I do this. I wanted to ask you just
Speaker 1: to begin by giving us your working definition of what
Speaker 1: counts as a hate crime or a bias crime from
Speaker 1: your perspective, Okay, hate crimes are crimes motivated by bias
Speaker 1: on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity.
Speaker 1: The precise categories, and it's important that you understand that
Speaker 1: they are categories, not groups. The precise categories vary by stack. Shoot,
Speaker 1: whatever hate crime statute you're looking at, it's mostly federal
Speaker 1: in state, and there are some states, like the state
Speaker 1: I'm in right now, Indiana, that prevent localities from enacting
Speaker 1: their own legislation in the context of criminal law. So
Speaker 1: even if we wish to, and I think that my
Speaker 1: particular city would probably wish to, particularly for the number
Speaker 1: of years that we did not have hate crime legislation,
Speaker 1: enact something, they cannot. They are forbidden by the legislature
Speaker 1: from doing something like that. When did federal or state
Speaker 1: governments start enacting laws that specifically punish hate crimes. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties, most of the statutes were passed. This
Speaker 1: happened after the creation of the nineteen Hate Crime Statistics SECTS,
Speaker 1: which was a federal piece of legislation, So mostly in
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties before that time, only Connecticut had biased
Speaker 1: crime legislation, and had Connecticut had it for a long time,
Speaker 1: or was it relatively new there as well, mid nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: So these are all relatively recent in grand historical terms,
Speaker 1: although I guess there's now thirty years, almost thirty years
Speaker 1: of experience with a lot of them. Both yes and no,
Speaker 1: they're similar. Some of them are similar to federal civil
Speaker 1: rights legislation that we've had, you know, for one hundred
Speaker 1: years or so, similar in what sense, similar in targeting
Speaker 1: a particular type of terrorism bias motivated violence, and civil
Speaker 1: rights acts targets motivated violence, but without the categories. The
Speaker 1: innovation of hate crime is the adding in of the
Speaker 1: categories bias on the basis of race, religions, orientation, ethnicity, etc.
Speaker 1: Whereas the Civil Rights Statute said that it's a crime
Speaker 1: to interfere with a person's exercise of his or her
Speaker 1: civil rights, and it just so happened that many people
Speaker 1: who are committing such crimes are doing so on the
Speaker 1: basis of race, or exactly precisely, that is precisely the issue.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of, you know, in the weeds
Speaker 1: questions which will come to it a second but I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask you if at the biggest level, you
Speaker 1: had to say, how successful has this body of legislation been?
Speaker 1: And this is the body of legislation that I think
Speaker 1: you've studied as deeply as anyone living. What's the measure
Speaker 1: of whether laws like this are doing their job? And
Speaker 1: then by whatever measure that is, are they doing their job?
Speaker 1: That's a hard question. It's hard first because this is
Speaker 1: violence that goes largely unpunished, but for the existence of
Speaker 1: these particular killer pieces of legislation. Take cross burning, for instance,
Speaker 1: if someone burns across on my lawn, then there are
Speaker 1: very few criminal statutes that you can use to prosecute them.
Speaker 1: For arson, for example, you need a burned spot, right,
Speaker 1: and a lot of times when someone burns across there
Speaker 1: isn't a burned spot. And there was a famous case
Speaker 1: that I'm sure you have heard of in which the
Speaker 1: perpetrators burned across r A V burned across on the
Speaker 1: lawn of the black family that it integrated the neighborhoods.
Speaker 1: It was actually part of a reign of terror that
Speaker 1: these white supremacists had directed at the family. They'd done
Speaker 1: other things, but they eventually burned across on the lawn
Speaker 1: of the family Middle and ninth, and the prosecutor chose
Speaker 1: to use a hate crime statute because there wasn't really
Speaker 1: much else that wasn't a felony. The adult involved had
Speaker 1: pled to misdemeanors, so they didn't want to charge the
Speaker 1: juvenile involved with a felony, so they chose this hate
Speaker 1: crime statute because there isn't much else you can use
Speaker 1: for cross burning. And is that a typical situation. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's fascinating what you're telling me, because it runs sort
Speaker 1: of counter to my own intuition, which obviously was wrong.
Speaker 1: I mean, my intuition was something like, if it is
Speaker 1: under these statutes, for example, a crime to beat someone
Speaker 1: up on the basis of racial bias, then you could
Speaker 1: charge them already with the beating them beating the person up,
Speaker 1: and then you could a ad and enhanced the sentence
Speaker 1: and add a separate crime the for the bias motivations.
Speaker 1: That was my intuition. But what I hear you saying
Speaker 1: is maybe that intuition is backwards. All right, You've zeroed
Speaker 1: in on something important, but you're still not quite correct.
Speaker 1: Cross burning is unusual in the context of hate crime
Speaker 1: and the sort of lack of overlap with the regular
Speaker 1: criminal law. What about assault bias motivated assault? Assuming it
Speaker 1: is a low level crime, right, meaning I'm not seriously injured.
Speaker 1: The perpetrator beats me up terribly, but you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not really seriously I mean, it's not life threatening, and
Speaker 1: it falls into the category of low level assault. You
Speaker 1: have a couple of problems with that. The first is
Speaker 1: low level crimes are largely not investigated by the police.
Speaker 1: They just don't. Criminologists estimate that nearly eighty percent of
Speaker 1: low level crimes are not investigated by the police. It
Speaker 1: doesn't really matter that this is an assault that targets
Speaker 1: me because of my background. It's still a low level sault,
Speaker 1: and this is not a priority for law enforcement officers.
Speaker 1: So I've just been terrorized and the police are not
Speaker 1: even going to try to figure out who did it,
Speaker 1: let alone try to catch the perpetrator. So I have
Speaker 1: been terrorized, and that same perpetrator could victimize somebody else
Speaker 1: and I could certainly could be victimized again. So one
Speaker 1: of the things that hate crime laws do is they
Speaker 1: create an incentive for law enforcement officers to investigate times
Speaker 1: that they would not. I call that a success because
Speaker 1: we as society have said that these crimes are more damaging,
Speaker 1: so they should be investigated. Help me fill in how
Speaker 1: proof gets constructed by the police and argued by the
Speaker 1: prosecutors and considered by the jury in cases where it's
Speaker 1: not flatly obvious on the surface. So maybe we could
Speaker 1: take as an example the Atlanta shootings that are fresh
Speaker 1: in our minds, where a disproportioned number of the victims
Speaker 1: were Asian American and that immediately led to a national
Speaker 1: discussion about bias and hate against Asian Americans, but in
Speaker 1: which it's also conceivable that the shooters motives were not
Speaker 1: tagged specifically to the ethnic or racial characteristics of the victims,
Speaker 1: which is not to say that they weren't, just to
Speaker 1: say that it seems conceive that there's another explanation. How
Speaker 1: would we go about figuring out the way the system
Speaker 1: would determine whether those crimes, which were crimes of murder
Speaker 1: and we're serious crimes and will be taken seriously in
Speaker 1: terms of identification and enforcement, whether that is in addition
Speaker 1: a bias crime that should be charged as such. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought up that case, in particular, if
Speaker 1: that case had been investigated by police officers who knew
Speaker 1: really anything about a hate crime, they say, all right,
Speaker 1: so there's a disproportionate racial group of individuals who may
Speaker 1: have been targeted because of bias. So what do we
Speaker 1: need to do. Well, we need to interview survivors. Let's
Speaker 1: interview survivors about what happened during the crime. The individuals
Speaker 1: who are survivors, their native language was not English. So
Speaker 1: you send in individuals who speak to the grieving survivors,
Speaker 1: grieving and traumatize survivors in their language, right, and you
Speaker 1: gather all the evidence of what happened during the crime.
Speaker 1: So if you look at the for instance, Korean language press,
Speaker 1: which actually did this, unlike law enforcement officers, they have
Speaker 1: a different story to tell about what happened. When the
Speaker 1: perpetrator came to the establishments, perpetrator said things like, and
Speaker 1: you can see this in the press. They said the
Speaker 1: perpetrator was there to kill all Asians. That's evidence of motivation. Right.
Speaker 1: You don't just interview the perpetrator and ask so why'd
Speaker 1: you do this? That's proper hate crime investigation. So you
Speaker 1: look in every location for evidence of motivation, just as
Speaker 1: you might any other crime. Murder for hire, for instance,
Speaker 1: you don't just act ask the perpetrator so, hey, anybody
Speaker 1: pay you to do this, We'll be right back. So
Speaker 1: interviewing survivors, doing so in a culturally and linguistically sensitive
Speaker 1: way is a crucial element. What else should what else
Speaker 1: is best practices for law enforcement to try to gather motive?
Speaker 1: I mean, is profiling a perpetrator, not by interviewing the perpetrator,
Speaker 1: but by talking to people a meaningful undertaking or is
Speaker 1: that more misleading than anything else? It's likely misleading, but
Speaker 1: you do talk to the perpetrators and moreover, one of
Speaker 1: the things that I think the literature is often really
Speaker 1: confused about is how secretive perpetrators are about their motives.
Speaker 1: In these cases. These are often individuals who have an
Speaker 1: ideological commitment to committing the crime. It's not as if
Speaker 1: they want to hide they're bias. And this is something
Speaker 1: that I explored with police when I was writing my
Speaker 1: first book, because I said, so, do you have all
Speaker 1: these perpetrators who you know, don't want to tell you
Speaker 1: that they were biased? And the law enforcement office of no,
Speaker 1: of course not. They're people who are biased, so they
Speaker 1: don't hide it. What's the right way to think about
Speaker 1: it where a perpetrator has let's call them mixed motives,
Speaker 1: and where a prosecutor would have to try to, I guess,
Speaker 1: impose a logic on them for purposes of convincing a
Speaker 1: jury that might not fully be present in the thought
Speaker 1: world of the person who's the perpetrator. So I mean,
Speaker 1: imagine not this case, but imagine a case where you know,
Speaker 1: someone is very a male perpetrator is extremely angry at
Speaker 1: sex workers who are women and are also members of
Speaker 1: a particular racial group, and goes and kills them. And
Speaker 1: you know, where there isn't let's say, contemporaneous evidence that
Speaker 1: he said, you know, I'm here to kill all Asians
Speaker 1: are similar. But where you know, we could infer from
Speaker 1: the circumstances that there seems to be some nature of
Speaker 1: hatred against women, there seems very probably to be racial hatred.
Speaker 1: What's the best way to think about the nature of
Speaker 1: bias where the hate is against some class of people
Speaker 1: that overlaps very much with one of the protected categories
Speaker 1: in the hate crimes legislation. Because it's a legal system,
Speaker 1: you need evidence of bias motivation, and in the mythical
Speaker 1: case that you've created, there is not evidence of bias motivation.
Speaker 1: That wouldn't suffice if someone says, you know, I'm really
Speaker 1: angry at women, that's not I mean, that's not sufficient
Speaker 1: motivated by bias? Right that crime? You know, we require particularization.
Speaker 1: Was that act motivated by your bias? We need evidence?
Speaker 1: And moreover, prosecutors are conservative. Of course, there are cases
Speaker 1: that I see plenty of evidence of bias, statements by
Speaker 1: perpetrators indicating they targeted the people because of their background,
Speaker 1: and prosecutors says, listen, a jury's not going to like this,
Speaker 1: and so doesn't bring charges hate crime charges. Do you
Speaker 1: have a feeling that in general, law enforcement, including prosecutors,
Speaker 1: are doing a reasonable job relative to what they could
Speaker 1: be doing under the law, or do you think they're
Speaker 1: under using the powers that the laws give them. Vastly
Speaker 1: under using the powers that the law gives them. Many
Speaker 1: more cases could be prosecuted as hate crime cases. Prosecutors, however,
Speaker 1: are not the largest problem. The largest problem stems from
Speaker 1: law enforcement. Law enforcement not presenting prosecutors with merely enough
Speaker 1: cases because they're low level crimes that don't get investigated,
Speaker 1: they are not reported to beliefs that it's a problem.
Speaker 1: Eighty six point one percent of law enforcement agencies in
Speaker 1: this country said in twenty nineteen that no hate crimes
Speaker 1: that had occurred in their jurisdiction, and every other figure,
Speaker 1: including victim surveys by the federal government, suggests many more
Speaker 1: hate crimes. I'm kind of shocked by that number. Eighty
Speaker 1: six point one percent of jurisdictions reported no hate crimes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sounds wildly implausible. Yeah, now, what's the solution to this
Speaker 1: structural problem, not the reporting problem, but the under enforcement problem.
Speaker 1: The solution is actually a solution that doesn't really involve police,
Speaker 1: but rather citizens. You need victims advocacy organizations, say the
Speaker 1: Game Lesbian Anti Violence Project for instance, to start believing
Speaker 1: that police can do something and developing relationships with the police.
Speaker 1: Places where hate crime law enforcement works best are places
Speaker 1: that say, all right, we're going to use the resources
Speaker 1: that we have, which include police departments, to find the perpetrator,
Speaker 1: stop this terrorism directed at individuals, and prosecute the crimes.
Speaker 1: So in places where I saw organize victims advocacy organizations
Speaker 1: that call the police and said, hey, you know, we
Speaker 1: have a person in our community who's been victimized by
Speaker 1: hate crime, and what are you doing about it? Exactly?
Speaker 1: Those police departments are incentivized to investigate crime, create bias units,
Speaker 1: press prosecutors, present cases to prosecutors, because police are the
Speaker 1: ones responsible for investigation. Prosecutors don't do this. Can I
Speaker 1: ask you a slightly bigger picture philosophical question that I
Speaker 1: was really puzzling over. I take it that the thrust
Speaker 1: of your research is that the statutes are pretty good.
Speaker 1: The challenge is really in law enforcement. As you were saying,
Speaker 1: there might be some tools to enable advocacy groups in
Speaker 1: civil society groups to help raise the consciousness of law
Speaker 1: enforcement and put put some political pressure on them to
Speaker 1: create bias units and improve enforcement. And everything that you
Speaker 1: said makes perfect logical sense to me. Then I think
Speaker 1: of what some of my most committed and idealistic students
Speaker 1: in that I teach in my law school are saying
Speaker 1: these days, and I bet that's the same as true
Speaker 1: for some of your students. They're talking about abolition of
Speaker 1: police departments, they're talking about abolition of prisons, and beyond
Speaker 1: those concrete proposals, they're also expressing a deep skepticism of
Speaker 1: the very capacity of police and law enforcement ever to
Speaker 1: overcome systemic racial bias, and in turn, that's causing these
Speaker 1: students to be very skeptical of criminal law as a
Speaker 1: tool for improving equal outcomes in society. And so the
Speaker 1: philosophical question is, how do you relate to these movements
Speaker 1: with respect to your own research project, which has been
Speaker 1: so focused on facilitating the police doing a better job
Speaker 1: than they are doing. So again, not that you're giving them,
Speaker 1: giving the police some free paths. To the contrary, you're
Speaker 1: calling on them to do their jobs. But if they
Speaker 1: were to do their jobs, it would mean more law enforcement,
Speaker 1: more criminal laws, and potentially more prison sentences. All right,
Speaker 1: So do you think Dylan Roof should be walking around?
Speaker 1: Dylan Roof is the young man who went to the
Speaker 1: church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed I believe nine
Speaker 1: people at a Bible study African Americans, all of them
Speaker 1: praying or praying and study Bible. So I certainly do not.
Speaker 1: But I'm also not a part of the abolition movement.
Speaker 1: So there's a role then for police here, and that's
Speaker 1: the first mistake that those abolitionists make, right, we have
Speaker 1: a role for they want law enforcement all they do,
Speaker 1: and they want law enforcement in this contact right very
Speaker 1: clearly a hate crime. Law enforcement is the reason Dylan
Speaker 1: Roof is not walking around. I think that you can
Speaker 1: extrapolate Dylan Roof to the person the kid who decides
Speaker 1: they want to leave racist flyers on my lawn or
Speaker 1: burn across on my lawn, scrawl something on my garage door.
Speaker 1: I think that there's a role for law enforcement to
Speaker 1: be involved in that. And to the concern about, well,
Speaker 1: we can't trust law enforcement to do this, I've seen
Speaker 1: law enforcement do this, and if we properly incentivize law
Speaker 1: enforcement and provide them this sport they need to do this,
Speaker 1: they can actually be quite good victim advocates. So I
Speaker 1: think that it's important not to throw the baby out
Speaker 1: with the bathwater. There are law enforcement officers who are
Speaker 1: quite biased. We know this, right, but it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that we should not expect law enforcement officers who don't
Speaker 1: have such biases to serve the public in the way
Speaker 1: that the legislators have determined they should. When you make
Speaker 1: that very compelling response to actual abolitionists, prison abolitionists, or
Speaker 1: police abolitionists, if you have had occasion too, would imagine
Speaker 1: you probably have. How is it taken? I mean, it
Speaker 1: seems so compelling to me, But again, I'm not starting
Speaker 1: from the same position as some of those critics of this.
Speaker 1: They respond by saying, listen, we can't trust law enforcement
Speaker 1: because they lock up a disproportionate number of African Americans
Speaker 1: for hate crime. And I say, well, actually, I've looked
Speaker 1: at that, right, I've looked at law enforcement that was
Speaker 1: actually doing the real work of investigating hate crime, and
Speaker 1: I did not see evidence of that. Show me law
Speaker 1: enforcement that is actually doing its job with respect to
Speaker 1: hate crime, and show me that they are disproportionately enforcing
Speaker 1: the law. You are just assuming because large numbers of
Speaker 1: African Americans, more than you think should be, are being arrested.
Speaker 1: And I say that's a problem that you need to
Speaker 1: correct with law enforcement, as opposed to again saying we
Speaker 1: shouldn't do this at all. When you work with law enforcement,
Speaker 1: I take it that sometimes you're wearing a pure researcher
Speaker 1: hat and sometimes you're wearing an advisor, guide advocate, help
Speaker 1: them do a better job hat, And maybe it's possible
Speaker 1: to wear those two hats simultaneously. I was wondering in
Speaker 1: either of these modes. What reception do you have you
Speaker 1: had personally as a scholar and a researcher and sometime
Speaker 1: activist in encountering police when you discuss with them, you know,
Speaker 1: this is how you can do it better. This is
Speaker 1: what you're not doing, This is what the point that
Speaker 1: you're missing. I haven't had that role actually with law
Speaker 1: enforcement officers. I am about to take up that role.
Speaker 1: And meaning until now you've been a pure researcher and
Speaker 1: now going to be Yeah, I'm gonna sort of try
Speaker 1: to start helping law enforcement locally, at least locally with
Speaker 1: the issue of hate crime and to boost reporting of
Speaker 1: hate crime, because that's another thing that law enforcement can
Speaker 1: do to better address the issue of hate crime. They
Speaker 1: can have someone on the other end of the line
Speaker 1: when people call and who is not a Joe Friday,
Speaker 1: just the facts man. And when you say you're about
Speaker 1: to take up that role, it sounds like you've already
Speaker 1: done the first steps of talking to them about how
Speaker 1: that might be doable. Oh. Yes, in part because I've
Speaker 1: experienced this. I was walking, you know, in the neighborhood,
Speaker 1: and someone yelled something out of a car. I knew
Speaker 1: because I teach the First Amendment that this was not
Speaker 1: a hate crime, but it was unpleasant, right. So I
Speaker 1: told a bunch of people about it, and one person
Speaker 1: that I told about it said, you need to report
Speaker 1: that to the police. I said, oh, come on, not good. Heavens,
Speaker 1: you know, I know more about the police and hate
Speaker 1: crime than most people. We don't even have a hate
Speaker 1: crime statute, not reporting. She said, listen, the police want
Speaker 1: to know about this. So I called the police, feeling
Speaker 1: quite foolish about this, and had an encounter with the
Speaker 1: law enforcement officer supposedly randomly who really got it about
Speaker 1: how to take information about incidents like this. He understood
Speaker 1: quite well the power of the police in these sorts
Speaker 1: of situations. You've mentioned increasing reporting as a desirable objective,
Speaker 1: and I want to to ask you about and this
Speaker 1: is whearing your social scientist analysts had. When we do
Speaker 1: see a rise in the reporting of hate crimes, do
Speaker 1: you tend to interpret that as just more consciousness, more
Speaker 1: people doing what you did and reporting things, police being
Speaker 1: more receptive to taking reports, or do you see it
Speaker 1: as reflecting background conditions that they're actually might be rising
Speaker 1: numbers of hate crimes in the United states in their
Speaker 1: current moment, because obviously the public wants to know which
Speaker 1: of those two things is happening. Even if it's inherently
Speaker 1: good for more crimes to be reported, we also want
Speaker 1: to know if there's more hate crime happening now or not. Well,
Speaker 1: if I know something about changes in procedures among police departments,
Speaker 1: then I will see it as better policing. But in
Speaker 1: the absence of any evidence that suggests that police are
Speaker 1: doing anything differently, I don't know where to place it.
Speaker 1: I really don't because the data is very, very bad.
Speaker 1: The data includes not just police reports right the FBI,
Speaker 1: the bad data collected by the FBI. But there's a
Speaker 1: center in California, the Center for the Study of Hate
Speaker 1: and Extremism, that also collects data. Southern Poverty Law Center
Speaker 1: collects data. There was a media organization also collecting data
Speaker 1: and just recording incidents. So those are fairly stable sources
Speaker 1: of data that don't have They have some problems, but
Speaker 1: they're different types of problems than law enforcement. So if
Speaker 1: the sorts of data show rises and the FBI data
Speaker 1: shows a rise, then that suggests that there's a lot
Speaker 1: more activity. That suggests there has been a rise so
Speaker 1: you pair the law enforcement data with other sorts of data,
Speaker 1: and that you would say, is suggestive that there actually
Speaker 1: is a rise out there, not just a rise in reporting,
Speaker 1: but aine a genuine rise in light of what's going
Speaker 1: to interactundring today. Yeah, exactly, to return for a moment
Speaker 1: to the Atlantis shooter, who has not presently been charged
Speaker 1: with a hate crime, you were saying that with better
Speaker 1: evidence collection and more expertise, law enforcement could well have
Speaker 1: been able to gather information, might still be able to
Speaker 1: gather information in a better way they would enable a
Speaker 1: hate crime to be charged. And I guess I'm wondering
Speaker 1: in the real world, what would it take for law
Speaker 1: enforcement to gather that information, and what information would it
Speaker 1: take to convince law enforcement to bring such a charge,
Speaker 1: And then what bigger picture difference would emerge in the
Speaker 1: world if his crimes were charged not only as crimes
Speaker 1: of murder but also as hate crimes. A bias unit
Speaker 1: in the police department or in area police departments, or
Speaker 1: some sort of special focus on hate crime in the area,
Speaker 1: some targeted attention to hate crime investigation would lead to
Speaker 1: a change in the way that they investigate crime. And
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter for offense. He will be at some
Speaker 1: point charge with multiple murders, multiple accounts of first degree murders.
Speaker 1: But it matters to the individuals who are targeted by
Speaker 1: the is violence and by individuals targeted. I'm talking about
Speaker 1: the entire community. Asian Americans all over the country are
Speaker 1: reeling from this, and it does violence to their pain.
Speaker 1: To say that it's not motivated by bias says that
Speaker 1: someone can go in and target a bunch of you
Speaker 1: and we can say, oh, having a bad day, that
Speaker 1: is awful. That's a very powerful answer. I want to
Speaker 1: thank you so much for the interview and also for
Speaker 1: your much more importantly, for your terrific and fascinating work.
Speaker 1: I learned so much from reading it and learn so
Speaker 1: much from a conversation. Thank you, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Listening to Professor Jeanine Bell was eye opening for me
Speaker 1: because of the precision that she brings to analyzing both
Speaker 1: the data around hate crimes and the technical legal issues
Speaker 1: that surround the decisions to investigate and to prosecute. I
Speaker 1: was stunned to hear her say that in a recent year,
Speaker 1: eighty six point one percent of the criminal jurisdictions in
Speaker 1: the United States reported to the FBI that they had
Speaker 1: experienced no hate crimes, and although I would love to
Speaker 1: live in a country where that was the actual reality,
Speaker 1: I seriously doubt whether we do live in such a country.
Speaker 1: It was also a very striking that she pointed out
Speaker 1: that where prosecutors and police don't have experience in investigating
Speaker 1: hate crimes, they might miss some of the most basic
Speaker 1: sources of evidence, including, for example, sympathetically interviewing victims and
Speaker 1: survivors of hate crimes in order to find out what
Speaker 1: evidence they have to offer about the motives of the
Speaker 1: people who committed the crimes in the first place. Overall,
Speaker 1: I can see why Professor Bell is so focused on
Speaker 1: encouraging police departments to develop expertise and distinctive hate crimes
Speaker 1: units who will have the relevant institutional experience and their
Speaker 1: elevant knowledge of how to go about investigating hate crime
Speaker 1: in order to then bring those crimes to prosecutors to
Speaker 1: be brought before juries. A further perspective that Professor Bell
Speaker 1: brought that was extremely interesting to me was her gentle
Speaker 1: pushback against those prison abolitionists and police abolitionists who are
Speaker 1: skeptical of the capacity of hate crimes to actually enhance
Speaker 1: racial justice. Professor Bell made the point that we all
Speaker 1: surely think that terrible murderers like Dylan Roof need to
Speaker 1: be put in prison, and that from there one must
Speaker 1: embrace at least the possibility that by enforcing hate crimes
Speaker 1: legislation more completely, more fully, and more fairly, we actually
Speaker 1: could improve the state of criminal justice with respect to race. Finally,
Speaker 1: I was struck that even in our terrible moment, where
Speaker 1: there appears, based on the data, to be arise in
Speaker 1: hate crimes around the country, she is nevertheless ultimately optimistic
Speaker 1: about the possibility that our criminal justice system could improve
Speaker 1: going forward by doing a better job with respect to
Speaker 1: the enforcement of hate crimes and biased crimes. In this moment,
Speaker 1: any optimism about the question of whether we might in
Speaker 1: fact to do better than we're doing is to me
Speaker 1: at least a sign of hope, array of possibility. Not
Speaker 1: that we're in a good place now, but that we could,
Speaker 1: by being careful, rational and precise, get to a better
Speaker 1: place in the future. Until the next time I speak
Speaker 1: to you, all, be careful, be safe, and be well.
Speaker 1: Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Mo laboord Our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, and
Speaker 1: our shorerunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband.
Speaker 1: Theme music by Luis Guerra at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell,
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Speaker 1: Eric Xander, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column
Speaker 1: for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot
Speaker 1: com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original state of podcasts,
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