U.S. Government Announces New Measures to Address Rising Rates of Hate Crimes
The Biden Administration has announced new steps they will be taking to fight and prevent hate crimes across the country. This comes less than a week after the shooting in Buffalo, New York, along with on the year anniversary of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes and Khalid Jabara-Heather Heyer NO HATE Acts.
Last Friday, May 20, US Attorney General Merrick Garland stated at a press conference that the Department of Justice has issued new guidance to aid law enforcement agencies and communities raise awareness and reporting signs of actions of hate crimes. According to the DOJ, they will also be providing $10 million in grant funding to support communities to build tools and organizations to address prevention and ideology fueling hate crimes, craft better resources to report crimes to the FBI, along with hiring a new Language Access Coordinator in Ana Paula Noguez Mercado. As the DOJ wrote on that role: “Language access is a key barrier to the reporting of hate crimes, and the Language Access Coordinator will help improve knowledge, use, and expansion of the Department of Justice’s language resources.”
As previously mentioned, these new steps come in the week following the devastating attack in Buffalo, New York. On May 14, Payton S. Gendron entered Tops Friendly Market with a rifle and opened fire, killing 10 people, and wounding another three, a majority of which were African American victims. According to the Associated Press, Gendron’s motive was made clear in a manifesto he posted outlining his racist, anti-immigrant and antisemitic beliefs. Those who died in the Buffalo attack were well-known community leaders, and their loss has rocked the Buffalo and United States at large.
Additionally, these new measures come near the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, an act addressing the rise in hate crimes throughout the pandemic, focusing particularly on the rising violence against Asian Americans. Back in 2021, according to NPR the organization Stop AAPI Hate documented over six thousand hate incidents against Asian Americans from March 2020 to 2021. The Act was crafted to provide resources of reporting and aid to those of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, and since then it has been expanded to encompass more communities and measures of assistance.
The need for acts like this comes from the steadying rise in hate crimes over the past decade, reaching its highest level in years in 2020. According to Aljazeera, there has been an exponential rise in assaults targeting those of African American and Asian American descent, with over eight thousand total hate crimes occurring in 2020. Of those crimes, it was reported that 62% were motivated by the victims’ race, ethnicity, or ancestry, with the primary motivators of sexual orientation (20%) and religion (13%) falling below.
Gun violence rates and homicides from firearms have additionally reached their highest rates in decades, compounded by the rise in mass and school shootings such as the one that occurred on May 24 at an Uvalde, Texas elementary school where 19 children were killed along with two adults.
