Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
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The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Iowa officials want more information about hate crimes being committed in the state to increase awareness and help victims and communities fight the problem.
Officials from the Iowa Department of Human Rights said the number of hate crimes reported by law enforcement agencies is only a small fraction of the hate crimes being attempted in the state. Officials want data on more than just hate crime convictions; they want to learn more about the number of complaints, reported and unreported, and arrests that don’t lead to convictions.
“We would need to expand the number of state agencies involved in collecting the information: public safety, highway patrol, including legislative and judicial committees within the legislature, if we want to bring some real notice to this concern,” said Walter Reed, director of the human rights department.
Nationally hate crimes are on the rise. Reports of long-standing symbols of hate, such as nooses, increased after the high-profile case of six black Louisiana teen-agers known as the “Jena 6,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes. Black students fought a white student two months after a noose was hung from a tree on school property, which media reports said sparked racial tensions.
President George W. Bush last week decried the increase of nooses being displayed across the country, which can can violate state and federal laws, and called the lynchings of African-Americans a shameful chapter in American history. “The noose is not a symbol of prairie justice, but of gross injustice,” he said in an Associated Press story on Feb. 12 during a Black History Month Celebration at the White House.
In Iowa a hate crime occurs when an offense is committed against a person or property because of race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability or because of a person’s association with people who have those traits.
Hate crimes are up nearly 8 percent to 7,222 incidents in 2006, from 7,163 in 2005, according to FBI statistics. The FBI Hate Crimes Report for 2006 showed the incidents spawned 9,080 criminal offenses, including 5,449 against individuals, 3,593 against property and 38 against society. The offenses included 2,911 acts of vandalism; 2.046 acts of intimidation; 1,447 simple assaults; 860 aggravated assaults, six rapes and three murders, among other crimes.
The report, which includes law enforcement statistics and biannual surveys, found that only 44 percent of hate crimes are reported to police. Police made arrests in about 19 percent of hate crimes, the report stated. Iowa reported 28 hate crime incidents, Nebraska 56, Minnesota, 137 and Missouri 78.
Iowa reported 33 hate crimes in 2005, according to the The Iowa Department of Public Safety. The data is derived from police and sheriff reports, according to a department spokeswoman.. Blacks were most often the targets, and the offenders were most often were white men, according to the report.
Reed said Africans and other immigrants in Iowa have expressed concerns about hate crimes. Hate crimes against those perceived to be undocumented immigrants is on the rise, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Anti-Latino hate crimes rose by almost 35 percent between 2003 and 2006, according to the center.
Officials would like to conduct a survey among Iowans about hate crimes to find out more about unreported crimes. Officials would use the results to increase awareness and help communities understand how to respond when a hate crime occurs.
“It would not be used to blame and point fingers but to get a baseline,” said Ralph Rosenberg, executive director of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, which takes calls from residents across the state who believe they may have been victims of hate crimes. “We just don’t have all the data.”
The best response to hate crimes is an immediate response from law enforcement, faith-based groups and the community, Reed and Rosenberg agreed. Commission volunteers from AmeriCorps VISTA, a national community service organization, are creating a packet of materials about how to respond to hate crimes.
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