From The Daily Nebraskan:
A Lincoln man recently came home to his apartment only to be greeted by the message, "FAG i DIE!" scratched into the finish of his front door. This was not the first incident the man had experienced since coming out of the closet - someone scratched a swastika into the paint of his car and he found feces outside his door.
These crimes, motivated by anti-homosexual bias, are classified as hate crimes by the Lincoln Police Department.
In 2006, the FBI received reports of 7,722 instances of bias-motivated crime from participating agencies around the nation. St. Louis reported eight, Denver had 11, Atlanta had seven and Chicago reported 33.
The Lincoln Police Department reported 36 hate crimes.
In 2007, that number jumped to 59.
According to the Lincoln Police Department policy, if both the victim of a crime and the original investigating officer feel the motivating factors behind a crime involved a negative bias, the incident is reported as a hate crime.
The difference in numbers of hate crimes in cities with larger, more diverse populations than Lincoln could be a result of less-stringent criteria required to classify a crime as bias-motivated. It could also be a result of a willingness on the part of the Lincoln Police Department to acknowledge hate still exists in the city.
"The (phenomenon) behind the large amount of reported hate crimes is solely because of the reporting practices (of the police department)," said Chief Tom Casady of the Lincoln Police Department. "We do good job of recording crimes as hate crimes compared to most other cities because we're not imposing an overly strict standard of evidence."
A problem with classifying hate crimes is there is no universal definition, said Hugh Whitt, a professor of sociology at UNL who studies religious hate crimes.
"Sometimes, you have to delve into the motivation of (the) people involved," he said, and that can be "real sticky."
For example, if a man wanted to rob a liquor store and selects a target at random, that is a crime. If the man decides to rob a store because the proprietor is black, that is a hate crime, Whitt explained.
Reporting hate as a category of crime is often voluntary and discretionary - some places don't even acknowledge that crimes motivated by hate are different than any other crime.
And, he said, without a doubt, hate crimes are under-reported.
"The key difference in Lincoln is we really want officers to use their common sense. If they have an inkling or thoughts about the motivating factor, they use their best judgment and report it," Casady said. "Poor reporting artificially depresses statistics."
The ease of classification increases the amount of crimes reported as hate crimes. This helps the police track trends based on type of bias and type of crime.
Acknowledging that hate crimes do happen in Lincoln pulls away the veil of denial about racism and hatred, he said.
"The advantage of this kind of reporting is we get a more accurate picture of hatred. To believe (eight) hate crimes happened in St. Louis flies in the face of common sense," Casady said. "How do you raise public awareness about the issue if (people) believe hate crimes don't occur here?"
Casady said the most serious hate crime Lincoln has experienced was the kidnapping and murder of Harold Grover, a gay man, in 1993. Grover was killed by two men from Kansas who traveled to the city with the intention of finding a homosexual and killing him.
The least serious, and one of the most common, is hate language, said either during fights or in graffiti.
"The worst words in the English language are hate speech. The dirtiest words are hate words," Casady said.
The words can be anti-homosexual language on a bathroom wall, spoken over the telephone as a threat, thrown about during a violent fight or spray-painted onto the sides of a vehicle. The police department has seen all of these happen within the last 18 months.
The victims and perpetrators are usually young people, Casady said.
"Young people who are racist are socially aware and know to keep their bigotry under wraps and not use the N-word but express the same attitudes towards gays and Asian-Americans," he said.
One incident in Lincoln in March involved middle-school age children in which the kids called a classmate gay, beat him with bamboo and assaulted him.
To cut down on the intolerance that leads to these kinds of incidents, Casady recommends action.
"Stand up against hate speech - refuse to listen to it, take away its audience or go somewhere else entirely," he said. "Any hate crime is one too many. I'm worried about the denial I see. People who just don't know or believe it doesn't happen don't call it out and run the risk of being complicit."
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