A new report from the Seattle City Auditorâs Office says that although the Seattle Police Department is cracking down on bias attacks, more work needs to be done. According to SPD Captain Mike Washburn, the most frequent attacks in Seattle target a person's race or sexual orientation. There were a total of 133 bias incidents in Seattle in 2009, of which 82 were bias crimes, Washburn said. SPD made a total of 34 arrests. Forty-one percent of the bias crimes targeted race while 37 percent targeted gays, lesbians, and other sexual orientations. The SPD has yet to adopt the City Auditorâs recommendation to produce regular reporting on bias crimes and incidents.
The report primarily looks at 17 recommendations made by the City Auditor in an August 2008 audit on Seattleâs enforcement of bias crimes and includes additional data from January 2008 to June 2009 on bias attacks in Seattle. The auditorâs Office used the term âbias attackâ to include, in addition to bias crimes, bias incidents which often involve hate speech not considered to be a threat and protected by the First Amendment.
SPD has implemented nine of the 17 recommendations, which focus on improved data gathering and bias crime reporting, education and outreach, and appointing a bias crime coordinator. Three of the recommendations have been partially implemented and five have not been implemented. The most significant data gathering improvement is a mandatory check-off field for bias crimes in the police officersâ computer reporting system. âAn officer will have to check a box to show whether the crime was bias or not,â said City Auditor in Charge Mary Denzel while presenting a report to the Seattle City Council Public Safety and Education Committee Wednesday. âSo even if it gets a bit automatic over time, at least it brings it to their attention.â
The police department has only partially started to publish reports on bias incidents and crimes. Denzel said that SPD sends some information on bias crimes to the FBI on a quarterly basis. âHowever, [that] only covers five categories of bias crimesârace, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and disability crimes,â Denzel said. âSeattle has 10 additional categories of bias crimes which are not covered, such as national origin, gender identity and homelessness.â Captain Mike Washburn of the Seattle Police Department said that new SPD officers received a dayâs training in cultural norms of different communities in Seattle as well as profiling training. Councilmember Sally Bagshaw said she was interested to learn more details about this and whether anger management lessons were available for officers given âthe couple of very public incidents in the past couple of weeks.â The SPD is under a lot of heat after an officer kicked a Latino man in April, pledging to "beat the fucking Mexican piss" out of him. Another officer recently punched a teenager during a jaywalking stop, sparking a series of investigations.
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Jacque Larrainzar from the Office for Civil Rights said that there was a lot of confusion after 9/11 in Seattle about the difference between hate crimes and bias crimes. Seattle reported a spike in bias crimeâespecially big increases in attacks on perceived national originâfollowing the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. âWe really need someone to coordinate outreach efforts, but we also know that the city is going through a difficult time,â Larrainzar said, referring to the ongoing budget cuts. Marvin Stern from the Seattle Human Rights Commission talked about creating a joint-working group which would provide support to victims of bias crime and encourage more bias incident reporting. Washburn said that geographically bias incidents were pretty evenly spread throughout Seattle. âThere was an anomaly when most incidents occurred in West Seattle targeting gays and lesbians,â he said. âWe made an arrest which cleared most of those up.â Councilmember Tim Burgess, who chairs the Public Safety and Education Committee, cautioned that bias crimes often lead to violence. He referred to âsignal crimesâ in England, where certain incidents may act as a âsignalâ to a community that they are at risk. He said his office plans to focus on bias crimes in the fall.
