A Federal Bureau of Investigation report indicates there was no perceptible spike in hate crimes and discrimination against South Asians in the preceding year.
In fact, the agency notes that incidents of racial violence and discrimination have significantly leveled off in comparison with the aftermath of 9/11.
Asian organizations like the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (NAPALC) – to which South Asian and Sikh groups like the Sikh Coalition, Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force and South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow belong – and Islamic groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations, which also represent South Asian Muslims from India and Pakistan, dispute the findings.
The groups say the low figures in the FBI report are far removed from reality, and argue that hate crimes and violence against South Asians, particularly Sikhs, and against Muslims from South and West Asia have continued. The incidents, they say, are not reflected in the FBI figures because of faulty categorization.
According to the FBI report, antagonism toward a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/national origin, or physical or mental disability prompted crimes against 9,100 victims during 2003.
There were 7,489 bias-motivated incidents last year – slightly more than the 7,462 reported in 2002, but not an alarming spike. Racial prejudice was the motive for 3,844 incidents in 2003, the report added.
Most victims of racially motivated hate crimes were African Americans. In 2003, incidents against this group totaled 2,548 and involved 3,150 African-American victims – nearly double the number of hate crimes against all other racial groups.
The report noted that the largest number of hate crimes based on religion was against Jews, with 927 incidents in 2003 – about the same level as a year ago.
Anti-Islamic crimes as categorized by the FBI report, which could include incidents targeting Arabs, Muslims, South Asians and Sikhs perceived to be Muslims or Arabs, numbered 150 – roughly the same level as a year ago. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, such hate crimes
spiked and drove up the overall number in 2001 to 9,730.
A review of the data by incident showed that all but four incidents were classified as single-bias (involving only one bias motivation).
A breakdown of the single-bias incidents by the type of bias revealed that 51.4 percent were motivated by racial bigotry, 17.9 percent were caused by religious intolerance, 16.6 percent were the result of sexual-orientation bias, and 13.7 percent were triggered by an ethnicity/national origin bias. The remainder involved a bias against a disability.
The majority of hate crimes committed included intimidation, comprising 49.7 percent of crimes in 2003, while simple assault accounted for 32.8 percent. Aggravated assault comprised 16.7 percent and the rest comprised murder and forcible rape.
Vandalism and property destruction was the most frequently reported hate crime offense against property, accounting for 83.4 percent.
The report noted that of 2,618 acts of destruction, damage or vandalism driven by bias, 47.6 percent were directed at individuals, 10.5 percent aimed at business or financial institutions, and 8.1 percent at religious institutions like synagogues, gurdwaras and mosques and 8.1
percent at governmental entities.
With regard to the race of the 6,934 perpetrators of the reported crimes, 62.3 percent were white, 18.5 percent were black and the race was unknown for 10.7 percent of the offenders.
The report is compiled from information submitted to the FBI by 11,909 law enforcement agencies from across the country.
While South Asian groups suggest that the FBI report underreports hate crimes against the community, the agency says it is all a matter of perception. FBI spokesman Paul Bresson told India Abroad the discrepancies between the numbers the groups claim and the statistics in the agency report, could be due to the fact that "all numbers are derived from police reports. They are not necessarily FBI statistics."
Bresson explained though the report is put out by the agency, its role is limited to compiling information from police departments around the country. "The crimes themselves are investigated by local and state police or the county police," he said.
"We don't really know why the numbers are what they are. We pay more attention to ensuring the numbers reported to us are tabulated correctly; that they are collected in accordance with our hate crime collection policies so that they are all in uniformity and that they, after a while, will lead to some meaningful comparisons you can make from year to year.
"Race-based crimes are sometimes a difficult statistic to record. It depends on the full analysis of a crime. You have to look at a crime in totality of all the circumstances and to the best of your ability try to determine what was the motivation behind the crime. One person's interpretation might be different from someone else's."
Bresson pointed out that some groups believe an act of murder is always a hate crime – but it could be motivated by personal reasons, and not be religious, caste or race considerations.
"At times, people think the number of crimes are up. In fact we see a significant increase right after 9/11 - crimes against Muslims, Sikhs, and other South Asians and Arabs. But from what we can see, the numbers in the last couple of years have tailed off and gone back to what we've
seen from year to year," said Bresson.
Aimee Badillo, staff attorney for NAPALC in its Hate Crimes and Race Relations division, told India Abroad, "One of the problems of looking at the FBI data and comparing it to our report - even though the last report we did was based on 2002 figures but the report for 2003 shows the same trends – we believe there is vast underreporting."
NAPALC and its affiliates in 2002 documented 275 bias-motivated hate crimes against Asian Pacific Americans, more than 40 percent against South Asian Muslims and Sikhs.
However, this number, in lending credence to Bresson's argument, was far lower than the 507 reported in 2001 and 392 reported in 2000, although Badillo said the less than 150 hate crimes against Asians contained in the FBI report were highly unrealistic.
"After 9/11, a lot of anti-immigration policies have been put in place to make people fearful to come forward," Badillo argued. "So on an individual level, victims of hate crimes oftentimes don't want to report to police because they don't want to be questioned on their immigration
status.
"Another reason, we believe, is inaccurate reporting," she said. "When law enforcement agencies receive the reports, they classify them under anti-Arab or anti-Asian and don't make an accurate distinction between whether this was an anti-Muslim crime, anti-Sikh crime and so forth. A lot of times, the reporting mechanisms don't have the categories on them.
"When they don't know how to categorize the ethnicity of the victim, they will lump it under maybe Asian or possibly Hispanic." She said many states do not report hate crimes. "In 2003, Alabama, Louisiana, Montana, Mississippi, reported 10 or fewer hate crime incidents. How
accurate can these be, to think that these states had less than 10 hate crimes for the year?"
She said anti-Asian bigotry or anti-Muslim, anti-Islamic or anti-Sikh incidents in the states would alone have been much higher than the totals they reported for their states.
Bresson countered the argument, saying that post 9/11, the FBI had been assiduously reaching out across the nation and meeting Sikhs and other South Asian and Muslim groups to address their concerns over hate crimes, racial profiling and discrimination.
"We've been very active in trying to build bridges with the Muslim, Arab, Sikh and other South Asian communities. We are trying to work closely in not only trying to gather information but also help them if they are victimized in any way," he said. "We want to reach out to those
communities and let them know we are very serious in our efforts to enforce civil rights responsibilities as well."
