The black Naperville family feared the worst when they heard a loud thump on the night of Oct. 14, 1995. The father could barely open the front door–a rope was tied from the outside knob to the garage door–but the sliver of space was large enough to allow a view of the large wooden cross on the porch.
This wasn’t the first threat. Months earlier, the letters KKK, for Ku Klux Klan, were painted on the driveway.
These acts were called hate crimes, at first. But after six white Naperville teenagers were implicated, police concluded the incidents were nothing more than misdirected teenage exuberance.
In Libertyville, a late-night rampage by four teenagers left a destructive trail on Sept. 28, 1996. Swastikas were painted on 11 cars and two homes, a church was covered with anti-Semitic slogans and a parked church van was firebombed.
Although charges were filed, hate was not considered a motive. These were random crimes fueled by intoxication, police decided.
As frequently is the case, decisions like these are highly subjective and made by frontline investigators who, critics charge, often feel they are protecting the image of their community. As a result, the Tribune has found, hate crimes in Illinois and other states are underreported or ignored by police.
Despite possession of the broadest and toughest anti-bias laws nationally, about 87 percent of Illinois’ law enforcement agencies, including those in Naperville and Libertyville, have concluded that hate crimes have not occurred within their jurisdictions, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
In theory, the Justice Department should know. As mandated by the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, the department annually prepares a report detailing bias-related crimes.
Atty. Gen. Janet Reno released the newest study last week during a Washington news conference.
What Reno didn’t note–what has largely remained a private footnote–is that hundreds of thousands of tax dollars have been spent to prepare a report that paints an incomplete, even skewed, portrait of hate crimes in the U.S.
In fact, so many law enforcement agencies nationally are apparently finding other names for hate crimes that those who work with the report have dubbed the annual Justice Department study as the “Zero Report,” referring to the vast majority of agencies recording no bias-motivated crimes.
Ignoring overwhelming evidence to the contrary–much of it found within Justice Department files–the report says that Alabama experienced no hate crimes in 1996.
In Hawaii, officials refuse to report their hate crimes. Law enforcement officials say the chore of cataloging hate crimes is too costly and time-consuming. Six states–Indiana, Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico and Tennessee–do not require police agencies to report hate crimes, although many report voluntarily.
One reason: Although the Justice Department is required to publish the report, police agencies are not required to report crimes.
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Hundreds of agencies don’t, or intentionally report inaccurate totals, said Jim Noland of Criminal Justice Information Services, a research arm of the Justice Department that prepares the annual study.
Despite these deficiencies, he said, the report has been cited with little or no qualification in scholarly studies and by the media, or used as a policymaking tool in awarding of grants or drafting legislation.
“We hear the report is used a lot,” he said. “The report should be used as a tool. It still has a lot of problems.”
In Illinois, for example, 114 departments, including Chicago’s, reported one or more hate crimes, totaling 333 for 1996. The remaining 787 agencies reported no hate crimes.
But a random examination of police and court files in Illinois by the Tribune shows dozens of incidents that are seemingly motivated by hate or bias but are classified solely as vandalism or trespassing.
Illinois’ totals not only appear to be misleading, they are incomplete. The state’s hate crime total, as published by the Justice Department, actually reflects only nine months of crime.
Computer compatibility problems thwarted efforts to compile offenses from January through March, said Larry Grubb, an Illinois State Police data collection supervisor.
Contributing to accuracy problems, Justice officials acknowledge, is confusion over the definition of bias and hate crime.
In Illinois, the definition requires a criminal offense committed against a person, property or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, ethnic group or sexual orientation.
But noble laws penned from legislative offices, no matter how concise, become blurred on the streets where criminal intent is not always easy to prove, said Naperville Detective John Burghardt, who investigated the KKK markings and cross incidents.
“Determining a hate crime is a very thin line,” he said.
As the 1995 incident attracted local media attention, the victims agreed not to pursue charges with an agreement by the offenders that it would never happen again, he said.
Despite no arrests, the Naperville incidents could have been reported as a hate crime under state guidelines. In Chicago, for example, bias-motivated offenses that do not yield arrests are still reported to the Justice Department, said Chicago Police Sgt. Anthony Scalise, who investigates hate crimes.
However, Burghardt said detectives could not conclusively determine if hate was a primary motive, so a decision was made not to report the incident as a hate crime.
“Some of these things we probably could classify as hate crimes,” he said, speaking about this incident and others. “But they go down as something else.”
Libertyville Detective Bill Kinast agrees, noting his department also could have filed hate charges involving the swastika and arson spree. However, detectives didn’t think it would be fair to tag the suspects with a lifetime stigma when, in their opinion, alcohol was a primary factor.
None of the suspects had a previous criminal record and were described as a 13-year-old Libertyville boy, a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old from Lake Bluff and a 16-year-old Lake Forest resident.
The boys got together one night, started drinking heavily, then decided to do something that would “shock the neighborhood,” Kinast said.
Perhaps no state better underscores problems with hate crime reporting than Alabama, which has a long history of racial animosity and long has been known as a stronghold for the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan organization. For 1996, Alabama officials reported no hate crimes for the entire state.
The state’s own investigations expose this dubious claim.
On Aug. 2, 1996, Stacy Hayes was walking down a back road in Newton, Ala., just as the balmy day was turning to evening. The 21-year-old African-American stopped at the EZ Serve Gas Station, planning to buy a soft drink, when he encountered three white men who began yelling racial slurs, police said.
As Hayes was being beaten, his attackers volunteered a seemingly clear motive: They told Hayes they were members of the local KKK.
To the state of Alabama, however, this is not a clear case of hate.
“It is not always clear if a crime was motivated by hate,” said Carol Roberts, spokeswoman for the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center, the official clearinghouse for the state’s crime statistics. “It’s an officer’s discretion to determine if a hate crime has been committed. To my knowledge, none have been.
“I hate to say this–and I’m speaking as a Jewish person–but if someone paints a swastika on a synagogue, they’re not always doing it from hate. Just stupidity.”
Roberts said the Justice Department has questioned the way hate crimes are evaluated, but “we told them we weren’t refusing to report; we just didn’t have anything to report.”
Finally conceding that hate crimes probably occur, she said the state was officially unaware of any incidents.
“That’s clearly ludicrous,” said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit organization based in Montgomery, Ala., that tracks hate groups and crimes. Dozens of incidents from 1996 have been brought to the center’s attention, he said.
From home burnings to a very public cross burning at the University of Alabama campus, the path of hate is easy to follow for anyone who wants to see it, he said.
Potok also questions the reporting accuracy and low rates of other Southern states, such as Arkansas, which reported just one hate crime in 1996.
Jan Chaikan, director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, said he has encountered many departments that are reluctant to acknowledge hate crime.
“They don’t want it on the record. They don’t want anyone to know they didn’t do anything about it,” he said. “I think there are a lot of departments like that.”
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Later this year, the bureau will award a $100,000 grant to study the hate crime collection process in an effort to improve accuracy. A recipient will be announced soon.
Additionally, the FBI will include questions involving hate offenses as part of the national victimization survey, which relies on victims instead of police agencies to report crime. High responses from victims in areas reporting little or no crime would spotlight obvious problems, he said.
Despite problems, federal officials and the Anti-Defamation League cite Chicago as an example of a city that takes a comprehensive and public posture against hate crimes.
Renee Goldfarb, chief of the Cook County state’s attorney’s criminal appeals division, said the city is “far from perfect” but has taken an aggressive approach to reporting and prosecuting hate crimes.
In 1996, Chicago police reported 175 incidents; last year saw an increase at 212 offenses.
Part of the increase is attributed to public awareness stemming from the case of Lenard Clark, according to the Chicago police civil rights unit, which investigates hate crimes. The 13-year-old African-American was severely beaten in the Armour Square neighborhood last March 21. Three white teenagers have been charged; trial for two of the teens is expected to begin in March.
Since 1993, a misdemeanor offense motivated by bias or hate can be elevated to a felony in Illinois; defendants convicted of felony crimes can receive extra jail time to a maximum of three years.
From a prosecutor’s perspective, Goldfarb said it doesn’t matter if alcohol or other factors play a contributing role with hate. Convictions have been obtained under those circumstances, she said.
But the law enforcement perspective typified by Libertyville and Naperville is likely to prevail, for now.
Naperville police recently caught two Kane County juveniles who randomly telephoned people with Indian-sounding names. The two would yell obscenities mixed with ethnic slurs.
Should the incident be statistically cited as a hate crime? Or is it an innocent prank by stupid kids?
Once again, walking on that thin line described by Burghardt, Naperville police said they will call this incident something other than a hate crime.