Newsday (New York)
December 8, 2002 Sunday
Attacking Hate Crimes;
Activists call for better defining, reporting of bias attacks
By Tina Susman. STAFF WRITER
In the collective mind of Brooklyn's Bangladeshi community, there's little doubt that the murders of Mizanur Rahman and Mohammed Hossain were motivated by religious and ethnic hatred. Both men, killed three months apart earlier this year, were attacked by several Hispanics who pounded them ferociously with wooden clubs but stole nothing. Rahman's attackers also used chair legs and bamboo sticks to beat him. Hossain's killers, after hitting him repeatedly with a baseball bat, stabbed him several times.
If those incidents weren't proof of rising animosity toward Asian-American Muslims, community leaders say, another beating two weeks after Hossain's murder was. On Nov. 24, Abdul Muhit, who immigrated to Brooklyn from Bangladesh eight years ago, was jumped by two Hispanic men a few blocks from where Rahman was slain.
"They weren't saying anything. They were laughing," said Muhit, who was carrying about $70 when he was knocked to the ground from behind. In an attack lasting about three minutes, Muhit said his glasses were smashed into his face, leaving shards of glass in his eyes, and his nose was split open, but nothing was stolen. "They wanted to try more torturing, but they couldn't because I was shouting," Muhit said.
Police, though, say there are too many unknowns to call any of the three attacks hate crimes, highlighting what special-interest groups say is the weakness of the 1990 federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act.
The idea behind the act was local law enforcement could better stem such crime if they knew where it was occurring and who most of the perpetrators and victims were. But although the act requires the Department of Justice to compile an annual record of hate crimes nationwide, critics say the resulting numbers are far from accurate because local law enforcement agencies are not required to submit reports and because police use wide discretion in determining what is a hate crime.
Religious, ethnic and gay organizations say factors from victims' fears of reporting such crimes to police indifference in pursuing them add to the problem.
The hate crimes report for 2001, released by the FBI on Nov. 25, cited a 17 percent increase over 2000 in such crimes. That included an alarming 1,600 percent increase over 2000 in attacks on individuals, businesses or organizations identified with Islam, a jump attributed to post-Sept. 11 bias.
But if the FBI reports are to be accepted without question, for example, Alabama would be the most tolerant state in the nation. It has never reported a hate crime, not even in 1999 when two men, angry over unwanted advances from a gay man, Billy Jack Gaither, beat him to death with an ax handle and threw his body onto a pile of burning tires.
Critics say because local agencies are not required to report hate crimes to federal officials, many authorities neglect to do so, which results in federal data full of "false zero" reports, such as Alabama's. Of nearly 12,000 local agencies - from police forces to hospitals and universities - that volunteered statistics for last year's FBI survey, only 2,106 reported any hate crimes. In 2000, a survey sponsored by the Justice Department of local agencies' hate-crime reports estimated several thousand bias incidents were never reported to the FBI.
The apparent reluctance of local police to label incidents as hate crimes discourages victims from going to police because they believe nothing will be done, said Krittika Ghosh of the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York, which pressed police to pursue the Bangladeshi attacks as possible hate crimes. "It's grossly underreported," Ghosh said.
In addition to victims' beliefs that police will not help them, she said there is a fear among immigrants they will be reported to federal officials for immigration violations if they come forward. Even her organization, which said it had received about 600 hate crime reports since Sept. 11, 2001, does not always encourage victims to go to police, because many immigrants believe they are in cahoots with the FBI and INS.
Such reluctance further stymies police and other law enforcement agencies, who say that defining hate crimes is a hazy enough task even with community cooperation.
"These are very, very gray areas," said Det. Kevin Czartoryski, a spokesman for the New York Police Department, who spent six years in the department's Hate Crimes Unit. In New York State, a crime must be motivated by hate "in whole" or in a "substantial part" to be deemed a hate crime, which can carry enhanced punishments.
"That's where it becomes gray," Czartoryski said. "You have to look at every factor." He said there are a number of reasons the Brooklyn incidents don't fall into the hate-crime category. In the Hossain case, for example, the victim and attackers were not strangers and had apparently argued earlier. Rahman was the victim of attackers out for revenge after earlier altercations with groups of Bangladeshi men, even though Rahman was not involved in those fights. No one was arrested in Muhit's assault, which, police say, makes it impossible to determine the motive.
Police agencies across the country have comparable standards for classifying hate crimes, resulting in similar disputes between law enforcement and victims' families. On Sept. 15, 2001, for example, Adel Karas, an Egyptian immigrant, was shot to death at his San Gabriel, Calif., market by unknown assailants who stole nothing. Relatives were convinced the shooting was a hate crime, but police said they couldn't classify it as such because of a lack of evidence. On Sept. 17, 2001, a Yemeni Arab, Ali Almansoop, was shot to death as he slept in his home in Detroit. The man arrested for the murder told police he was angry at Almansoop over the terrorist attacks. However, he was also jealous because Almansoop was seeing his ex-girlfriend. For that reason, police did not classify the slaying as a hate crime, and Michigan shows up in the latest FBI hate crimes report with no bias-motivated murders last year.
Ghosh said such circumstances should not be enough to dismiss many hate-crime allegations. In the Bangladeshi attacks, she said the level of brutality and the numbers of assailants were strong indicators of hate-motivated violence. "Just because the two parties knew each other, that doesn't mean it isn't a bias crime," she said.
"I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that labeling it as a hate crime means admitting there are tensions between people in a neighborhood, and police would have to take action," she said.
Indeed, Bangladeshis living in the gritty East New York section of Brooklyn, where Rahman and Muhit were attacked, say they have complained several times about gangs of youths harassing them and have requested extra police protection after dark, to no avail.
Nazrul Lasker, a Bangladeshi who runs a travel agency across the busy avenue from where Rahman was killed, said he had been called a "bloody Indian guy" by non-Muslims in the neighborhood who assumed because of his appearance that he comes from India.
"There is a hate," said Lasker, blaming it on resentment toward the number of thriving, Asian-run shops in the area coupled with anger at Muslims since Sept. 11. But asked whether local Muslims report most incidents, he said, "They don't go to the police because the police do nothing."
Muhit said when the police responded to his call for help on Nov. 24, they insinuated he was drunk because he was staggering. Muhit said he was staggering because he was observing Ramadan and had not eaten all day, and because he had just been beaten.
Muslims aren't the only group wary of hate crime record-keeping. Groups representing gays and lesbians are suspicious of figures showing 1,393 crimes in 2001 linked to the victim's sexual orientation. They include the FBI's only reported gay-bashing murder for the year, a teenage cross-dresser beaten to death in Cortez, Colorado.
Denise de Percin of the Colorado Anti-Violence Program, which tracks crimes based on sexual orientation in that state, said crimes against gays never were accurately reported in the FBI data because many states' laws did not recognize gays as a special category of people prone to being targeted. That fuels attitudes that gays are legitimate targets, de Percin said.
"When it's not called what it is - a hate crime - I think the sense is that you can do something and get away with it," she said.
For Muslims, the issue has a new sense of urgency since Sept. 11, and in the run-up to a possible war with Iraq, which they fear will bring a new rash of violence against them. Before Sept. 11, Muslims were one of the least-targeted groups, according to FBI records, but last year's report showed they had become one of the most frequently targeted. Crimes against them, and against people believed to be of Middle Eastern descent, rose from 354 in 2000 to 1,501 in 2001.
"I love this country so much, but I don't know what happened and what is going on now," Muhit said. "I can't believe what has happened."
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