In this CVR podcast series, we talk with those doing research and serving victims and learn about the work they've done together.

Tell Us About It, Episode 13: Collecting and Understanding Hate Crime Statistics with Jack McDevitt

A convo with Jack McDevittMay 03Time: 21:14

 

Transcript:

Susan Howley Welcome to Tell Us About It: Victim Research Convos, a podcast from the Center for Victim Research with support from the Office for Victims of Crime. On each episode of Tell Us About It, we talked to researchers and practitioners about their work the tools being built for use in the field and how we can work together to build an evidence base for victim services.

Susan Howley Today we’re talking with Jack McDevitt, Director of the Institute on Race and Justice at Northeastern University and professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Jack, welcome.

Jack McDevitt: Thanks, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Susan Howley: Jack, you’ve had a wide-ranging career in justice and victim-focused research, but one area that stands out is your work on hate crimes and hate crimes statistics. What is it about this area of research that you find compelling?

Jack McDevitt Well, it’s an interesting story. I started working on hate crime in the 1980s and at that point no one even knew what a hate crime was. There were very few laws about it. There were very few police departments and a lot of people said it didn’t exist. And one of the challenges was to document how often hate crimes occurred, because in order to get legislation passed in the states or federally, everyone asked well how often does this phenomenon happen? And we didn’t have any data on it. So I started from a place of saying no one understood what hate crime was and people doubted that they were really occurring. The only way we could do with that is to be able to say well, we’ll measure it locally and we’ll measure it at the state level and try to tell you how often this crime occurs.

Susan Howley How did you start counting, when the people who should be counting said it didn’t exist?

Jack McDevitt Well, we had to get some converts in the beginning and champions who believed in it and they became – interestingly enough, it was mostly police that were there. There were obviously advocacy groups that had been involved in this, but it was individual police officers who said “I want to work on this problem in my community. I think it does exist and I want to work on it.” So a police officer from Boston, Billy Johnson, was one of the first officers to start collecting this data and documenting the hate crimes. New York City was an early adopter of hate crime. So we had some champions from law enforcement who said, you know, this is a problem. And in order for us to get attention either in our police department or in our community, we need to document it.

Susan Howley So how did you work with that small group of converts or champions within law enforcement to build out a national system of collecting hate crime statistics?

Jack McDevitt That’s a great question. What we did was have a bunch of local police departments collect the data for themselves and put it up on their websites or have a report that they would produce. And those started to be the basis for what became the Hate Crime Statistics Act, which passed in 1990.

It was originally proposed as legislation to make hate crimes illegal federally. We couldn’t get that far, mostly because of the issue at that time about the LGBTQ community – many states didn’t want to recognize them in their legislation. So what we were able to get was the federal law that said well, let’s at least count these. And then at the time Janet Reno was the Attorney General, and the law mandated that she count how many hate crimes there are across the country. So the Hate Crime Statistics Act was the first federal legislation that said all right, we’re not going to criminalize anything but we’re going to at least count it and see what kind of problem it is.

Susan Howley So when you tried to count it, did you work with just those agencies that were already counting and then try to calculate a national figure? Or did you try to really get broad statistics from every corner of the country?

Jack McDevitt That is a really interesting and important question. That was a debate that was had between federal officials from different government agencies, from state officials – you know, should we do a national probability sample and get the best estimate we can from those agencies that are already collecting hate crime data, or should we do a national data collection effort? And I was advocating that we do the national effort because at the end of the day, what we understood was that counting it is important, but it’s not the end that we want. The end that we want is to have more victims being serviced by the criminal justice system. So although we knew when we said we’re going to ask every police agency to submit data that we were going to have problems, that we’re going to have resistance, we’re going to have bad data. The end product of all of this was we were going to have more victims being helped. And so that was our goal, was to sort of continue to do data collection across the country, try to get every agency to participate and with the hope that we would be servicing more victims through that process.

Susan Howley Because you were educating more law enforcement about what hate crime is and how to count it, the hope was then they would be attuned if the victims came forward.

Jack McDevitt Right. Exactly. We would – in order to have a data collection system, we have to train the police departments on how to identify a crime so that they can record it. And part of that training that we went around the country and did, the FBI – I was part of the team that went – was to say well, what is a hate crime and why is it important that we deal with it? How does it impact victims? And that was a big part of the training. And so police departments were left with the idea of, okay well if this happens in our jurisdiction, now I at least know what it is and I can count it. But more importantly, I can respond to victims who say it’s happening to them and try to help.

Susan Howley Oh that’s great. So it’s research but with a real practical implication.

Jack McDevitt Absolutely. We knew we were going to have data that had gaps, but we were also going to have thousands of police departments that were aware of this concept that hadn’t been aware of it before.

Susan Howley Right, so using statistics to start building a better response from the get-go.

Jack McDevitt: Yup, exactly.

Susan Howley: Now, training officers to identify and record hate crime is one thing, but were there other challenges? I mean, hate crime is such a hidden crime. What were the other complications in trying to get good statistics?

Jack McDevitt Sure, there were a couple of things. A lot of – in the beginning, people didn’t understand that these were, in fact, different crimes and they thought, it’s just an assault and should be treated as an assault. And then once we got over that hurdle, even when we had departments that were trying hard to collect the right data, like every crime, there’s an underreporting problem in hate crime. Some victims won’t come forward and there’s some good reasons for that.

One of the things that we learned when we talk to victims was, you know, they feel incredibly vulnerable because they sort of carry the cause of their victimization around with them. If you’re attacked because you’re African-American, there’s nothing you can do to not be African-American. As you know very well, if we’re training somebody who’s – if we’re dealing with someone who’s been a victim on how to deal with the victimization, we can give them tools and stuff to minimize the chance they’ll be victimized in the future. But if the cause of your victimization is your race, your ethnicity, your religion, how do you change that? You can’t. And so what we found is that victims will try to find any other reason for the attack than their race or their religion or ethnicity or another characteristic. It’s got to be something else because it’s so threatening to think that I can’t do anything to prevent this if it’s based on that.

Susan Howley As you look at today’s collection of hate crime statistics, what’s one of the biggest frustrations that you have in this area?

Jack McDevitt Well I think one of them is that – it’s sort of with a lot of the different kinds of things that we’ve done in the past – is that we have a lot of people that want to say, okay we’ve dealt with this. We’ve moved past it, you know, around the whole broad issue around race, that we’ve moved past these issues and we can now move on with other things. So I think that one of the frustrations is that – as we’ve seen recently in Pittsburgh and San Bernardino and a whole bunch of other places – hate crimes are still with us. And you know, it’s still the case that people are attacked because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, other characteristics. And we have to continue to deal with them. Have to try to do prevention and do some intervention when those cases do exist. And that’s a frustration, because we aren’t there yet. I hope we’re getting there, but we’re not there yet.

Susan Howley What should advocates know about the hate crime statistics that they see and want to use? Do they need to be aware a careful of certain things when using those statistics?

Jack McDevitt Absolutely. The hate crime statistics that we have only tell part of the story. I think that one of the things that we learn is: A) like every crime, it’s underreported. As we’ve discussed earlier, you know, not all victims will come forward, not all police departments will accurately classify these crimes. But the other thing is that we just know what a police department categorizes this particular crime as. So we’re relying on a lot of other folks to, you know, understand, recognize, and record the hate crime. So there is misclassification that happens. The other thing that happens a lot is the victims see – advocates will come to us and say, Well tell me how many Cape Verdeans were attacked or how many Cambodians were attacked. And it seems like they think that their group is specifically targeted. And what I’ve learned over the years is that offenders are not specialists; that they really hate people who are different, and once they go for one group and make an impact in that group maybe moving out of a community, then they turn their efforts on the next group. So I think victims need to band together to say we’re all victims of this this crime and we’re going to support each other as we move forward.

Susan Howley You also founded the Institute on Race and Justice. Can you tell us how this came out of your hate crime work?

Jack McDevitt Sure. My hate crime work was one of the first pieces of research that looked at race in the justice system and how the justice system dealt with that. And I started to see a whole bunch of other areas where the justice system did not deal effectively with racial, ethnic differences, LGBT differences, any kind of difference. So, for example, we started to do work on racial profiling and looking at who police were stopping, either on pedestrian stops or traffic stops, and we saw disparities there. We’ve done work on human trafficking, where individuals are forced into sexual labor. And we also see police misconduct where it’s, you know, disproportionately directed at people of color. So the Institute has sort of broadened the areas within the race and justice nexus to sort of say, how does the justice system deal with this, and we try we’ve tried to intervene in a variety of different places.

Susan Howley Now I know the Institute uses community based participatory research methods, because I spend a little time on your website. But how do you incorporate the community into this type of work?

Jack McDevitt Well, it’s really interesting. One example is the Massachusetts racial profiling study we did. We had a monthly meeting that included police chiefs, community residents, advocacy groups, – because they’re not the same thing. It’s really important to understand that advocacy groups have their own agenda, but they don’t necessarily represent the community – and policymakers.

Jack McDevitt We met every month for two and a half years and we talked about how we’re going to code data, and about how we’re going to run analysis, what our comparisons or benchmarks are going to be, all things do you think the community would be bored to tears by but they really helped make our research better. They say, well what about this? What about this experience I’ve had? How are you going to document that? What about this experience that my son had? How is that going to get documented? And it was really, really helpful and so we’ve incorporated that into our other studies to sort of bring the community voice in to say what are we missing? What have we mischaracterized here in your experience that we are not measuring? And it makes our research so much stronger.

Susan Howley Right, I can see where that would be so valuable. How did you start? You know, if another researcher were out there saying, I want to involve the community. I’m sure you didn’t just open your doors and say come on in community. How do you get going in that area?

Jack McDevitt We formed a community advisory board and that was a key component. So we had people who came – we reached out to a bunch of different community leaders and said, you know, would you like to be part of a community advisory board? I thought they’d all say no. But they didn’t, they said tell me more. And we talked about the fact that they could help impact the research and make the research stronger.

Jack McDevitt They really sort of bonded with us and said, yeah we want to do that. Now, one of the most amazing things I can say about this is that, we’re 14 years old and we have some of the original community advisory board members still with us after 14 years. And that’s a non-compensated monthly meeting, coming forward to try to help us get the research we’re doing right. And that’s just amazing and so rewarding to me that people would hang in there. We have additional people on the board, but we do have a core of people who’ve been there the whole time and just think that this is worth their time to put into helping make the area of race and justice and policing and courts and corrections all improved.

Susan Howley That’s great. I can see where having their voice is so important to your research. Do you have any sense of how they might be disseminating information to their peers, to their colleagues, to their communities, that they are learning through your work?

Jack McDevitt Yeah, they do it in two ways. One is when we have a report out, we always run it by them during the preparation of the report, when it’s finalized, and they can then help us, sort of, tell people about the research and what its findings are. And that’s important, but more importantly, they’ll tell people who say, all these academics are always, you know, coming to our community and not helping us and say that that’s not true for all academics and say that we’ve tried to help. You know, in the community, a lot of what we academics do, it looks like hey, we want to come to your community, we want you to fill out this survey or we want you to do this interview, provide this data, and then we go away, we write it in our journal articles and they never hear from us again. We’ve made it very, very clear that we’ll continue to say they’ll help guide the research and the research will go back to the community in ways that try to make it better.

Susan Howley That’s great. What goes into the decision at the Institute to take on new projects, or for yourself, a new area for your work?

Jack McDevitt Well it’s a lot of – the goal of the Institute is to affect public policy, so to use research to affect public policy. So what our goal is is to say, you know, there is a lot of good research that’s done to sort of basic science, to just advance our knowledge. We’re sort of in a place of saying, how do we make something better? And so if we’re doing a racial profiling study, then – we’re doing one in Kansas right now, and basically the police departments have to commit to using the research to improve the policing they’re giving to their community if they want us to be involved. And so that is a huge benefit. It also makes all of the research real. Because you’re dealing with people on the ground who have either been racially profiled or police officers who are fearful that they may be racially profiling through unconscious bias. And so we really try to look for places where we can have a policy impact.

Susan Howley How do you get that agreement or understanding upfront that the people you’re working with will use the results of your research?

Jack McDevitt Well, you know, it’s interesting. Over the years, we’ve certainly had some people who were forced to work with us. A state will pass a law and say you’re going to do racial profiling analysis or you’re going to do a hate crime study or whatever and then we end up doing it with them and they’re reluctant in the beginning. But I think that by really trying to be fair and not say everybody’s a racist or every police officer is perfect, to say here’s how we’re going to do it and we’re going to involve you in the process. We most often – not in every case but most often – have been able to convert people to the fact that their organizations will be better if we do this together and do it correctly.

Susan Howley Looking down the horizon, where do you see this work going on hate and bias crime?

Jack McDevitt Well, as I said, there’s still a lot of work to do. But where I get excited is how far we’ve come. When I started this work, as I said, in the 1980s, I would go to police departments and they would say there’s no such thing as hate crimes. Or why do we want to take care of that group? They’re just criminals. And there was really a lot of bias and there was a lot of denial of problems. When I go to police departments now, I don’t have to tell them that there is such a thing as hate crime. They know it is. They may not know where it is in their community yet, but they know that hate crimes exist and that’s a huge step forward. They know that victims need help. I know when we talk to hate crime victims, one of the things they say is they need the police to take it seriously. Because almost every hate crime victim is threatened by the offender and they say, if you tell the police we’re going to come back and get you or get your family. And these advocacy organizations, who are wonderful, they can’t protect them. You know, the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, they can’t protect a victim. The police can. So it’s really important that the police say, we’ll protect you as a victim while we investigate this case. And I think that where we’ve seen progress is police recognize that that’s part of their role now, and in the beginning they didn’t. I think we still need more police to do that. We need the courts to step up and take it more seriously. But we’ve seen progress and that makes me very excited for the future.

Susan Howley That’s great. Jack, this conversation has been so timely and you’ve given us a lot to think about as we work to improve our research and response to hate and bias. Thank you for sharing your work with us today.

Jack McDevitt It was a pleasure talking to you. I enjoyed it very much.