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| CREDIT: Antony Savvas/capacitymedia.com New Mexico, April 2010. Paul Beebe, Jesse Sanford and William Hatch. Three men accused of kidnapping a Navajo man with mental disabilities in Farmington. Writing anti-gay slurs on him, shaving a swastika on his head and branding him with a wire hanger. These three became the first in the county to be charged with violating the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Over a decade later, the FBI are in fear that New Mexico hate crimes are going unreported. They are trying to find a way to better document incidents across the state. Special agent in charge of the FBI Albuquerque office, Raul Bujanda has said, the issue is "dear to the heart of the agency." Defined by the FBI, a hate crime is "a criminal offence against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity." It was reported in 2018, 25 hate crimes were reported. In 2019, the number became 50. There was no data for 2020. "There's just a lot of instances that have happened, unfortunately, in the past several years that have made us look to see, 'What is going on in America?'" "We don't have a whole lot of confidence in the numbers. We felt for the most part that hate crimes were being underreported. How do quantify hate crimes?... It's all really based on what people tell us and how it gets reported to us." The FBI is launching a campaign in order to raise awareness in the community about hate crimes and how to report them. They also plan to train local and state law enforcement to better detect and document such crimes. "We want to make sure we get that word out to the community and say, 'If you are or if you believe that you're a victim of hate crime, simply just call us.' We want to get that message out there so we can go from maybe underreporting to actual true numbers." |
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