the form of obscene or hurtful verbiage spray painted
on private or public property.
Victims of bias crime are targeted because of their
perceived race, ethnicity/national origin, religion, sex-
ual orientation, gender, and physical disability.
Whether victims actually are members of the targeted
group matters little to their offenders; it is the percep-
tion that they do that drives offenders. Most targeted
groups also tend to be singled out for negative stereo-
types. Given the established relationship between
stereotypes and prejudice, it is not surprising that
members of the most negatively stereotyped social
groups are also members of groups most frequently
targeted by bias crime offenders. Thus, victims of bias
crime disproportionately involve racial, ethnic, sex-
ual, and religious minorities.
In the FBI’s 2005 Hate Crime Statistics report, of
the 8,380 reported bias offenses, 4,691 were racially
motivated, 1,171 were instigated because of offend-
ers’ perceptions about their victims’ sexual orienta-
tion, 1,314 resulted from religious prejudice, 1,144
were due to ethnicity/national origin prejudice, and 53
targeted victims because of a disability they were
believed to possess. These numbers remain relatively
consistent, although they reveal a slight drop from the
9,035 offenses reported in the 2004 statistics report.
It is worth noting that reluctance and fear on the
part of certain immigrants and ethnic minorities may
serve to stifle reports of certain bias offenses. Indeed,
like many forms of criminal activity, many bias crimes
that occur are not reported. Additionally, underreport-
ing may be particularly likely in the case of victims of
antigay bias crimes who, like rape victims, may not be
willing to risk disclosure or be subjected to investiga-
tion by insensitive or unhelpful law enforcement per-
sonnel. Moreover, whether an actual bias crime is
recorded as such is very much at the discretion of the
individual law enforcement officer. Findings from one
federally funded study, reported in Lu-in Wang’s pub-
lished work, found significant variation among police
officers in their decisions to categorize incidents as
bias crimes as well as within the state agencies charged
with reporting to federal agencies.Criminalizing Bias Crime
In recent years, criminologists and legal scholars have
debated the usefulness of criminalizing bias, and debates
about the constitutionality of legislation that penalizesit abound. Of course, crimes that are motivated by bias
are not new. The history of bias as an instigator and
motive in criminal activities occurring within the
United States predates the establishment and enact-
ment of any legislation in the country. The legal
scholar Brian Levin notes that “status-based depriva-
tions” such as slavery were in place at the very same
time that deliberations about the Constitution and
Declaration of Independence were under way. What is
new about today’s form of bias crime, however, is the
existing legislation as well as the corresponding
efforts aimed at enacting additional legislation penal-
izing these activities. The term bias crime,first used
by journalists and politicians, is well entrenched in
today’s academic and juridical circles.
Most jurisdictions see bias crime as emanating
from a perpetrator’s bias targeting some feature of the
victim (e.g., racial status or sexual orientation).
Although the Hate Crime Statistics Act (initially pro-
mulgated in 1990) mandates that all jurisdictions
report the number of bias offenses that have occurred,
there is substantial variance in the extent of participa-
tion across states. Like other offenses included in the
FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, bias crimes are volun-
tarily reported by local jurisdictions.
In 2005, several members of the House of
Representatives introduced a bill that would represent
an amendment to the law that mandates the FBI’s col-
lection of bias crime information to include gender as
a protected category (called the Hate Crime Statistics
Improvement Act of 2005). Historically, gender has
not been included in the FBI’s definition of bias
crime. The bill never became a law, and the current
Federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act does not require
the FBI to collect data on crimes that may manifest
evidence of a gender bias. However, of the 41 states
that have crime statutes, 19 of them include gender-
based hate crimes in their hate crimes laws.
Importantly, where bias crimes were formerly lim-
ited to the actual physical presence of an offender (e.g.,
an assault) or the offender’s sentiment (e.g., graffiti or
vandalism), widespread usage of the Internet has
enabled offenders to transcend the boundaries of space
and time. According to a representative of the ADL,
“the majority of Internet hate crime cases result from
e-mails containing threats.” Indeed, because of the pro-
liferation of biased sentiment throughout the Internet,
“cyber hate” is now investigated and tracked by advo-
cacy groups, such as the ADL, as well as the FBI.48 ———Bias CrimeB-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:41 PM Page 48