Reports of crimes based on a victim's race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation have been climbing steadily over the past decade.

Since Connecticut enacted hate-crime legislation a decade ago, there have been more than 1,000 bias-related rapes, assaults, threats and incidents of harassment and vandalism reported to police. According to statistics from the state department of public safety, 82 hate crimes were reported in 1989. In 1997, there were 119.

Much of the growth is due to the fact that many more police departments are monitoring and reporting the crimes, said to Marcia Hess, a research analyst with the state police Crimes Analysis Bureau.

Of those that are reported, fewer than half go to trial, recent statistics show. In addition, victims have complained that police sometimes do not advise them that the law is available to pursue their assailants.

Some of those who have tried to use the law have found that police officers are unaware that the law exists or are not interested in pursuing the cases. Even when police and prosecutors are on their side, the results can be mixed.

"It took nine months and a lot of court sessions,'' said David Dyer, describing the effort to prosecute a man who drew bloody swastikas around his Milford neighborhood.

Gays and lesbians make up a fraction of hate crime victims in Connecticut, state statistics show. In Connecticut, as nationwide, blacks are more than twice as likely as any other group to be victimized by a hate crime.

Since 1990, about 40 percent of Connecticut's hate crime victims have been black. About 19 percent have been Jewish, 14 percent white and 12 percent gay or lesbian.

Criminal mischief attacks on property such as drawing swastikas are the most commonly reported hate crime in Connecticut, officials say.

Assault is second. The last murder in the state that was sparked by prejudice occurred on May 15, 1988 six weeks before the states first hate crime law was enacted when Richard Reihl, a 33-year-old gay man, was beaten to death with a log in his Wethersfield apartment.

Pressure to enact hate crime laws in the Connecticut began building in the early 1980s, when the Ku Klux Klan rallied across the state.

The Klan rallies "made many people take notice that Connecticut is not immune to racial and ethnic hatreds,'' said Miles Rapoport, the former secretary of the state who sponsored the hate crimes bill when he served in the Senate.

In 1996, New Haven reported 20 bias crimes to the state, nearly three times as many as any other community, state statistics show.

Bridgeport and Hartford each reported five that year.

"They're not just reactive, they're proactive,'' said Roger Vann, the president of the Greater New Haven chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"They not only encourage people to report problems when they occur, but they also are about the business of educating people on issues related to race and differences and diversity.''

From the Hate Crimes mailing List, a Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project (AVP) initiative Now archived @ http://www.queer.org.au/listarchive/hate-crimes/

NEW South Wales police will take part in the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras for the fourth consecutive year.

Georges River Region Commander Ike Ellis yesterday said police had maintained a strong profile as participants in the parade in the past, as well as controlling crowds and traffic.

He said only gay and lesbian liaison officers would be allowed to march and they were expected to wear their uniforms.

The officers would not be paid, he said.

Cmdr Ellis said other officers who wished to hand out violence prevention material could do so on a voluntary basis, but they would not be allowed to wear their uniforms.

He said he hoped police participation in the Mardi Gras would reduce prejudice-related violence and harassment of gays and lesbians.

From the Hate Crimes mailing List, a Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project (AVP) initiative Now archived @ http://www.queer.org.au/listarchive/hate-crimes/

Linking crime and rhetoric
Hard evidence is hard to find, but some hints exist
by Rhonda Smith and Lisa Keen
The Washington Blade

Many Gay activists blamed anti-Gay rhetoric and newspaper ad campaigns sponsored by religious right groups last fall for creating a climate of hostility that led to the beating death of Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard. Individuals outside the Gay community put the blame there, too.

Days after Shepard's death, New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote: "If you wage a well-financed media air war in which people with an innate difference in sexual orientation are ceaselessly branded as sinful and diseased and un-American seekers of 'special rights' ground war will follow.

"It's a story as old as history," Rich continued. "Once any group is successfully scapegoated as a subhuman threat to 'normal' values by a propaganda machine, emboldened thugs take over."

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen echoed Rich.

"To call [Gays] sinners, the equivalent of neo-Nazis, people with an agenda that surpasses their loyalty to their country, is to separate them from you and me - to put them beyond the pale," he said. "This sends a message to goons and others not given to great subtlety."

Cohen urged that "anti-Gay politicians ought to reflect on how they have given voice to some of the ugliest sentiments in American society -- inadvertently legitimizing the sort of hate that left Matthew Shepard tied to a fence and near death, lynched on account of being gay."

But is there any hard evidence to support what many people believe common sense suggests?

A Blade analysis of various reports on hate crime against Gays across the country during the 1990s revealed a mixed answer. The number of hate crimes against Gays did climb in Colorado and Oregon following contentious anti-Gay initiative campaigns there during the early 1990s, but not around similar events elsewhere. And a discussion of this phenomenon with Gay activists who are working to curb hate crimes indicates that such crimes tend to rise whenever the public spotlight shines significant attention on this population - whether the increased attention is positive or negative. For example:

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) documented 89 hate crimes against Gays in Colorado in 1991 and more than twice that number -198 - in 1992 during the campaign for the anti-Gay initiative Amendment 2. NCAVP reported that 40 percent of Colorado's hate crimes in 1992 took place after the passage of Amendment 2 in November 1992 when the battle had moved to the courts.

In 1993, during the height of a national public debate over whether Gays should be legally allowed to serve in the military, the FBI recorded 860 hate crimes against Gays nationwide. That was a 12 percent increase over the number in 1992, when FBI reports counted 767. (Reports from law enforcement agencies were voluntary and only 41 states and the District of Columbia submitted them in 1992, while 46 states and D.C. submitted them in 1993.)

NCAVP organizers say anti-Gay violence generally peaks each year during the month of June, when most communities nationwide are celebrating Gay Pride Month and Gays are more visible and likely to attract more media attention.

In 1997, when there was widespread national publicity over the coming out of actor Ellen DeGeneres and her primetime television character, Ellen Morgan, FBI statistics indicate there were 1,315 hate crimes based on sexual orientation reported nationwide. That was an 11 percent increase over the previous year, when the FBI had reports of 1,180 hate crimes based on sexual orientation across the country.

Of course, correlation does not necessarily define causation. For instance, while hate crimes went up during 1993 when the nation was embroiled in its debate on the military, 1993 was also the year that right-wing conservatives launched their largest flood of anti-Gay initiatives around the country. It also was the year Gay political activists were given widespread credit for helping deliver a winning bloc of votes to the most pro-Gay president in U.S. history. The question is whether any increase in hate crime increases can be attributed to hate campaigns or to backlash against any attention to Gay issues. The answer appears to be: both.

"What happened with Ellen generally generated positive attention for our community," said Jeffrey Montgomery, a member of NCAVP's seven-member steering committee and executive director of the Triangle Foundation, a Gay civil rights group in Michigan. "But that publicity also generated a huge backlash of negative attention from the radical right."

Montgomery said an argument could be made that positive discussions took place related to debates about whether Gays should openly serve in the military or be allowed to legally marry "because it gave the Lesbian, Gay, bisexual, and transgender community a number of opportunities to make their cases."

"But," he added, "each of those events certainly invited a huge negative backlash against Gays from radical extremists."

Thus, it is hard to prove that the publication of four anti-Gay ads in nine major daily newspapers last July could be largely blamed for creating the climate in Wyoming that led to Shepard's murder. The ads urged Gays to seek help from "ex-Gay ministries" to become heterosexuals. But many Gay activists and others contend that the widespread attention given to the ads - prompting discussions aired on national television and elsewhere - can, by way of just common sense, be blamed for such a climate.

"Many people now think that the 'ex-Gay' lifestyle is a legitimate alternative to being Gay. The Christian Right has bankrolled this deception with their television and newspaper ad campaigns," said political analyst Surina Khan of Political Research Associates, upon the release in late 1998 of a report she wrote titled Calculated Compassion: How the Ex-Gay Movement Serves the Right's Attack on Democracy. "The consequence of what they do is create a climate of intolerance. That was true in the civil rights movement, and it's true now."

Following Matthew Shepard's murder, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors wrote a letter to groups that funded the ex-Gay ministry ads stating that there was a "direct correlation" between such ads and anti-Gay hate crimes, including the murder of Shepard.

The Family Research Council, a recipient of the letter and one of the religious right groups that helped pay for the anti-Gay advertisements last year, did not return a call from the Blade to respond to such accusations. But the San Francisco Examiner reported that last November, in response to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors? letter, FRC leader Gary Bauer (who has indicated he plans to run for president in 2000) called the suggestion "a scurrilous and utterly unfounded charge."

"There is no evidence," Bauer said, "that the thugs in Wyoming ever saw our ads or were influenced by them in any way. If they had, they would have seen such statements as 'We believe every human being is precious to God and is entitled to respect.'"

Robert Carter, director of research and writing at the Florida-based Center for Reclaiming America, another group that helped pay for the ads, did speak with the Blade about the religious right's "Truth in Love Campaign." The ads contended that Gays could change their sexual orientation with the "transforming love of Jesus Christ."

Carter said holding protests or speaking out against homosexuality or abortion rights does not encourage or automatically lead to violence against individuals or groups.

"People are free to say as passionately as they choose that certain decisions are wrong," he said. "But it's a leap to suggest that because someone speaks against a particular issue that person is advocating violence."

Carter also said that no member of the groups that sponsored the "Truth in Love" campaign has advocated violence against Gays.

"When acts of violence occur, our group and others condemn that violence," he said. "In the tragic death of Matthew Shepard, the Family Research Council, the Center for Reclaiming America, and Focus on the Family all condemned that violence."

Carter said his group would continue to speak out against homosexuality because it has a right to do so. He also noted that there is no evidence directly linking the 1998 ex-Gay advertising campaign with Shepard's murder.

"No one ever accused the two defendants in Shepard's death of reading our 'Truth in Love' campaign material," he said. "Violence happens. We?re not encouraging that. The fact that violence happens shouldn?t discourage people from speaking the truth."

Montgomery, in Michigan, agreed with Carter's conclusion that there is no proof that directly links the anti-Gay ads with Shepard's murder. But he reiterated that he sees an indirect causal relationship between the ads and the murder.

"With the ads, they were denigrating and dehumanizing Gay people and portraying them as having some sort of curable disease," Montgomery explained. "In any environment, toxins can build up over time before they reach some critical level.

"It's difficult to determine at which point the poison put out there by the radical right extremists became toxic enough that people felt like they had a license to kill," Montgomery said. "But the murderers of Matthew Shepard were likely influenced by this sort of atmosphere, where it seemed OK to feel the way they felt about Gay people."

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and similar organizations said in October that religious and political conservatives had fostered a climate conducive to violence against Gays.

"The ex-Gay movement and the ad campaign about it is simply one more weapon in the conservative arsenal of those who want to wage war against the rights of the Gay community," said Kerry Lobel, executive director of the NGLTF. Lobel went on to say that anti-Gay religious right groups lack scholarship in their arguments about "curing" homosexuality since mental health experts oppose "therapies" trying to change Gays to straight and most psychotherapists agree that homosexuality is not a disease to be cured.

In fact, in December, the American Psychiatric Association adopted a formal position against so-called "reparative therapies," partially in reaction to the ex-Gay ad campaign and Matthew Shepard's murder.

Dr. Edward Hanin, head of the APA's Council on National Affairs, said a resolution opposing reparative therapy was approved by the APA because the association felt a "stronger statement" from mental health experts was needed "in light of Matthew Shepard's death and the recent ads that have appeared."

Matthew Shepard's murder, coming on the heels of the attention around the anti-Gay media campaigns, brought attention to the problem of hate crimes in a way that no other incident or campaign had previously. But the impact of hate-related campaigns on the incidence of hate crimes has been apparent for years, say many Gay activists.

Gay activists in Oregon began documenting hate crimes based on sexual orientation there in late 1991, so insufficient data exists to compare hate crimes then against the number which emerged in 1992 with the statewide anti-Gay initiative. But an NCAVP report published at that time indicates that hate crimes against Gays increased dramatically in Oregon in 1992, and it suggests reasons that, again, put at least part of the blame on the anti-Gay religious right's activities.

"In an atmosphere poisoned by, among other things, anti-gay sensationalism," the report concluded, "violence against lesbians and gay men escalated in Oregon. The Lesbian Community Project in Portland tallied 968 incidents of anti-gay violence - more than any other lesbian, gay, and bisexual victim service agency in the United States in 1992."

The anti-Gay hate crimes in Oregon that year included two murders, two rapes, a cross burning, 143 reports of vandalism, 69 physical assaults, 166 instances of threats of violence, and 796 instances of harassment. The report also indicated that in November 1991 the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which led the anti-Gay ballot initiative there, sent thousands of copies of an anti-Gay video, titled The Gay Agenda, to churches and other organizations throughout Oregon.

"The 20-minute video asserts that gays, 'desperate for relationships - desperate for love' average between 20 and 100 partners a year," the report stated. It also indicated that another OCA video portrayed Gay men as sexual predators.

In addition, the NCAVP report stated that violence permeated Oregon throughout the campaign and that a Gay-friendly organization, titled Campaign for a Hate Free Oregon, had its offices ransacked and campaign donor lists stolen.

"People whose names were on those lists received phone and mail death threats," the report stated. "Simply being lesbian, gay, or bisexual became dangerous in Oregon."

Donna Red Wing, the Human Rights Campaign's national field director, was head of the Lesbian Community Project at the time. Red Wing and Portland Police Department officials expected an outburst of violence on election night, the report said. But when the election results indicated that voters rejected the anti-Gay ballot initiative, "the anti-gay violence plummeted," said Red Wing.

But, again, not all anti-Gay campaigns have led to documented increases in hate crimes against Gays.

In 1992, residents of Portland, Maine, and Tampa, Fla., were also engaged in anti-Gay initiative campaigns tied to an effort to overturn laws created to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. But a corresponding rise in hate crimes against Gays was not evident. The FBI statistics, provided by police departments in those states, indicate:

There were four hate crimes based on sexual orientation reported in Portland, Maine, in 1992, when the city voted to retain a human rights law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. The following year, 1993, there were eight such crimes even though there was no campaign for Gay civil rights there or, apparently, anything else that would have led to the rise in hate crimes. In 1994, there was no campaign and no hate crimes against Gays in that city.

In Tampa, Fla., there was one hate crime based on sexual orientation reported in 1992. In 1993, there were no such crimes reported. In 1994, there were two such crimes.

Gay civil rights activists are counting on the attention given to Shepard's murder to illustrate the need for the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which would make violence against Gays, among others, a federal crime. The proposed law would make it a federal crime to commit acts of violence against people based on race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or disability. Violations could result in prison terms of up to 10 years if a bodily injury occurs or threats are made that involve dangerous weapons, explosives, or fire. If a hate crime results in death, kidnapping, an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, an assailant could be fined or be sentenced to terms of up to life in prison.

The law also calls for amending the federal sentencing guidelines to increase penalties against adult defendants who recruit juveniles to assist in committing a hate crime. In addition, federal officials at the U.S. Department of Justice would have authority to make grants available for state and local programs designed to prevent hate crimes committed by juveniles.

"We expect [the proposed federal law] to have a preventative effect in that, when the federal government can investigate and prosecute hate crimes against Gays, the state will also take notice and begin either better enforcement or new enlightenment to the problem of hate crimes," said Kris Pratt, legislative director for U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), the first openly Gay female elected to Congress.

Pratt, a former senior policy advocate at the Human Rights Campaign, said supporters of the proposed federal law believe that because it would grant the federal government authority to take over a hate crime case in a state, local law enforcement officials would be more likely to try to handle the case themselves.

"The law is more of a deterrent," Pratt said, "and once these perpetrators of hate realize that hate crimes are taken more seriously by federal, state, and local governments, they will think twice about injuring someone simply because of who they are."

The federal hate crime prevention bill has not yet been introduced during the current congressional session. The Human Rights Campaign and other individuals and organizations who support the bill are working with U.S. House members to create a bipartisan measure, Pratt said, supported by as many members of Congress as possible.

"The Senate is ready to go; we want to get the House to go along with it," Pratt said. "The president, in his State of the Union address, mentioned that the Hate Crimes Prevention Act should pass this year. We fully expect it to go forward."

From the Hate Crimes mailing List, a Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project (AVP) initiative Now archived @ http://www.queer.org.au/listarchive/hate-crimes/