Home > Message from IOICA Director > Hate Crimes Sign on
Retain Campus Hate Crime Data Collection Improvements in Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act
March 25, 2008
[Dear Senators/Representatives]:
The undersigned civil rights, religious, education, law enforcement, and civic organizations urge you to support the House-passed provision to improve campus hate crime data collection (H.R. 4137, Title IV, Section 488). This simple, straightforward provision will merely make the Department of Education’s campus hate crime categories identical to the crime categories that have been collected by the FBI under the Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA) since 1991. This much needed change will give students and parents a more complete picture about campus safety.
Every year, thousands of students are the victims of bias-motivated slurs, vandalism, threats, and physical assaults on college campuses. In 1998, to increase awareness of hate violence on college campuses, Congress enacted an amendment to the Higher Education Act (HEA) requiring all colleges and universities to collect and report hate crime statistics to the Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE) of the Department of Education. Currently, colleges must report only those crimes involving bodily injury in which the victim was targeted because of his/her race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or disability. Unfortunately, the Department of Education’s current hate crime statistics reflect very substantial underreporting http://ope.ed.gov/security/Search.asp. Even worse, the limited available data directly conflicts with campus hate crime information collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the HCSA.
For example:
- In 2006, the FBI recorded 10 hate crimes at the University of Connecticut. OPE reported zero;
- At the University of Minnesota, the FBI has reported 22 hate crimes since 2004. OPE has reported zero hate crimes at Minnesota over that time period;
- Virginia Tech University has reported 15 hate crimes to the FBI since 2004. OPE has reported zero hate crimes at Virginia Tech over that period.
The inconsistencies in the current data gathered by the Department of Education and the FBI result, in large part, from discrepancies between the FBI definition of a hate crime and the HEA definition. The FBI definition includes larceny/theft, intimidation, simple assault, and destruction/damage/vandalism – all categories currently omitted by the Department of Education. The omission of these crime categories has resulted in significant gaps in OPE data, substantial inconsistencies between FBI and OPE statistics, and confusion for parents and students trying to obtain a more accurate sense of campus security issues. Uniform hate crime data collection efforts would also enable campus police to utilize the excellent FBI hate crime training materials already widely in use across the country.
In 2006, the FBI documented over 7,700 hate crimes, reported by more than 12,600 law enforcement agencies across the country http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2006/index.html. Schools and colleges were the third most-frequent location for these hate crimes. The HCSA has proven to be a powerful mechanism to confront violent bigotry against individuals on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or national origin. Importantly, the HCSA has also increased public awareness of the problem and sparked critical improvements in the local response of the criminal justice system to hate violence.
We urge you to support the House-passed provision to revise the Department of Education hate crime categories to make them uniform with those collected by the Department of Justice. If you have questions or need additional information, please contact Michael Lieberman at the Anti-Defamation League (261-4607/mlieberman@adl.org) or Lisa Maatz at the American Association of University Women (785-7720/maatz@aauw.org.
Sincerely,