To help law enforcement better combat hate crimes, conduct effective investigation and prosecution, and develop stronger ties with communities of color and others, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in partnership with the Matthew Shepard Foundation will conduct a hate crime-response training Tuesday for law enforcement in Milton, Mass., sponsored by Massachusetts’ Municipal Police Training Committee.
The daylong training will include topics such as:
- The impact of hate crimes on individuals and communities;
- The reporting of and data related to hate crimes; and
- The effective enforcement of state and national hate crime laws.
Additionally, the curriculum will include presentations by families whose lives were directly impacted by hate crimes.
“To effectively combat hate crime, law enforcement must have the trust of the communities they serve,” said Arusha Gordon, associate director of the James Byrd Jr. Center to Stop Hate, a project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Our goal is for law enforcement to walk away from our trainings with a deeper understanding of the impact of hate crimes on communities and a better sense of how to support communities and individuals targeted for hate.”
According to the FBI’s 2019 Uniform Crime Reporting a victim’s perceived race/ethnicity/ancestry remains the largest motivating factor in the hate crimes data, with nearly half of those crimes motivated by anti-Black or African American bias. Hate crimes motivated by anti-white bias dropped from 20.1 percent in 2018 to 15.7 percent in 2019.
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