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Problems with under-reporting hate crimes persist, CSUSB professor saysBuzzFeed NewsDec. 13, 2018 Brian Levin, director of California State University, San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, was interviewed for an article about law enforcement agencies that under-report, or don’t report at all, hate crimes. Year after year, the vast majority of police departments across the country report zero hate crimes to the FBI. After sifting through more than 2,400 police incident reports from 2016 obtained from 10 of the largest such departments, BuzzFeed News identified 15 assaults in which the cops’ own narratives suggested that the suspect may have been motivated by bias. “If it is a suspected hate crime, that should be tagged and referred up the chain of command,” said Levin, a former New York City cop. “What is so striking is that problems that we thought were eliminated are still going on in large jurisdictions.” Read the complete article at “The cities where the cops see no hate.”
Professor comments on study on bullying that is grounded in bias-based crimesPatchDec. 14, 2018 Brian Levin, director of California State University, San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, was quoted in an article about a study on bullying by North Carolina State University researchers. The growing incidence of bias-based crimes underpins the need for more national leadership to stem them, the civil rights organization said. In previous administrations, the political gulf was just as wide, but 'there was a line that wouldn't be crossed with regards to over-the-top bigotry' that doesn't seem to exist in the Trump administration, Levin said. The study by Kelly Lynn Mulvey and Elan Hope didn't measure the incidence of bias-based bullying, though experts who track bias point to an alarming uptick in the two years of the Trump administration. Read the complete article at “Bullying tougher to confront when it's bias-based: Researchers.”
CSUSB professor and other experts discuss difficulties in prosecuting hate crimesVice NewsDec. 13, 2018 Brian Levin, director of Cal State San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, was one of the experts interviewed for an article about the difficulty facing federal prosecutors as they try a man. already convicted of murder, for hate crimes related to that case. A Virginia jury convicted James Alex Fields with the murder of 32-year-old Heather Heyer in a matter of hours, yet hate crimes are difficult to prove because the burden falls on the prosecution to demonstrate that bias or hatred against a protected group motivated an individual to commit a crime. Levin pointed to a 1992 Supreme Court decision that overturned a death sentence for David Dawson, a member of the white supremacist prison gang Aryan Brotherhood, who broke out of prison and murdered an elderly white woman. A jury used Dawson’s membership as an aggravating factor, but the Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors hadn’t demonstrated his chapter engaged in or promoted racist, violent acts. Read the complete article at “Why it will be hard to convict neo-Nazi James Alex Fields of hate crimes.”
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