By Kaitlyn Sill and Paul A. Haskins.

This article originally appeared in Police Chief and is reposted here with permission from the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Hate crimes harm whole communities. They are message crimes that tell all members of a group—not just the immediate victims—that they are unwelcome and at risk.

The damage that bias victimization causes multiplies when victims and justice agencies don’t recognize or report hate crimes as such. In addition, in cases for which law enforcement agencies fail to respond to or investigate hate crimes, relationships between law enforcement and affected communities can suffer, and public trust in police can erode.[1]

While it is known that hate crimes are underreported throughout the United States, there is not a clear understanding of exactly why reporting rates are low, to what extent, and what might be done to improve them. An even more elementary question, with no single answer, is: What constitutes a hate crime? Different state statutes and law enforcement agencies have different answers to that question, which further complicates the task of identifying hate crimes and harmonizing hate crime data collection and statistics.