DENVER – Colorado lawmakers took a step toward encouraging transparency in reporting hate crimes on Monday.
House Bill 1138 would require the Department of Public Safety to give a yearly presentation before the Legislature detailing the number and locations of bias-motivated crimes reported across Colorado. It was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously after limited testimony and no opposition.
Sen. Angela Williams, D-Denver, the bill’s sponsor, said the HB 1138 is an effort to evaluate whether trends exist in the perpetration of hate crimes and ensure the Legislature knows the location and frequency of these crimes.
The bill is a response to the spike in hate crimes during the final 10 days of the presidential election, when 867 hate crime incidents were reported, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Williams said.
Hate crimes, or bias-motivated crimes as they are known in statute, are actions that are motivated by a persons “actual or perceived race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, physical or mental disability, or sexual orientation.”
Included in those who supported the bill was Jeremy Shaver, a representative of the Anti Defamation League, who brought up the hate crime statistics collected by the FBI in 2014 and 2015.
In 2014, the FBI documented 5,479 hate crimes reported by 15,494 agencies across the nation. In 2015, the number of crimes increased by 7 percent to 5,850 despite there being a decrease in the number of reporting agencies, down to 14,997.
In Durango and La Plata County, the statistics for reported hate crimes showed an opposite trend, with six being reported in 2014 and three in 2015.
Shaver said the connection between fewer agencies reporting and the increased number of incidents is concerning as are inconsistencies in the reporting.
“In 2015 and 2014, three Colorado communities with a populations over 100,000 – Lakewood, Thornton and Westminster – reported zero hate crimes even though those same municipalities reported multiple crimes in previous years,” he said.
According to Shaver, there is no process to determine if the reporting for these areas is accurate.
That was something the original version of HB 1138 hoped to remedy by requiring the accuracy of the reporting be verified by the state justice officials, but this would have required an increase expenditure from the state and was stripped by the sponsor of the bill because the state lacks funds.
Despite this, sponsors and the Anti Defamation League believe the bill is a step toward ensuring accuracy in reporting of bias-motivated crimes.
“This legislation helps ensure the Colorado Legislature has an accounting of hate crimes in Colorado, and we hope it will lead to an assessment as to whether we have the most effective public safety policies in place and whether our law enforcement agencies have the right tools and support they need,” Shaver said.
The bill has already been approved by the House and will next head to the Senate floor.
lperkins@durangoherald.com
