Hate Crimes Info
NCAVP Annual Hate Crimes Report
PlanetOut News Staff, 4-7-00
The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) on April 6, 2000 issued its annual report on anti-gay hate crimes in 1999. The sixteen member programs use a standard form to collect data in thirteen areas around the U.S. based on reports of crime victims who contact them and supplemented by law evforcement and news reports. Although this sampling procedure does not lend itself to statistically meaningful comparisons, in some ways it is the best data available in the U.S. since law enforcement participation in national hate crimes data collection remains erratic.
Overall, NCAVP identified a total of 1,965 incidents ranging from verbal taunts to murders. In 1998, NCAVP had identified 2,017 incidents (3% more), but the apparent drop resulted from substatntial decreases in four areas--the others showed a 40% increase. Rates have been dropping nationally for violent crimes in general.
The incidents that were documented were noticeably more violent in 1999 than in 1998, which had already been more violent than in 1997. Murders were up from 26 to 29 nationwide. Although the number of assaults and attempted assaults held steady, there was a marked increase in the use of guns and other deadly weapons, as opposed to rocks and bottles.
Among those incidents documented by NCAVP compared to the previous year, police appeared to do "a poorer job overall of responding, " "made disproportionately fewer arrests" and often did not label the incidents as hate crimes. However, the number of incidents in which police were the perpetrators of anti-gay violence was substantially lower in 1998 than in 1999, dropping from 369 to 265.
michigan led the other states with eight homophobic murders in 1999, there were just two there in 1998. A total of 96 incidents were identified there in 1999, involving 112 victims and 87 offenders, but only 28 incidents were reported to police and only seven of those resulted in arrests. in 1998, a total of 130 incidents were identified with 143 victims and 140 perpetrators, with 50 incidents reported to police leading to 100 arrests. Jeffrey Montgomery, executive director of the Triangle Foundation, an NCAVP member program in the Detroit area, said, "This year's numbers are deceiving. We see a decrease of reported incidents in Michigan. However, the level of violence attached to each incident continues to increase from year to year."
Massachusetts programs documented 174 incidents in 1999, one-fifth more than in 1998. There were no homicides, but 45 people were injured, 36% more than in 1998. A little more than half of the incidents occurred in Boston, where Fenway Community Health's Violence Recovery Program, an NCAVP member, is located. Seventy-three percent of the victims in the state were male.
San Francisco Bay area programs documented 325 incidents in 1999, compared to 395 in 1998, but the number of sever injuries increased by one-fifth to 88. Transgenders were the targets of violence in 18% of the incidents, almost doubling 1998 figures. In the state of California, there were six anti-gay murders in 1999, compared to only two in 1998. Tina D'Elia, program director of San Francisco's Community United Against Violence (CUAV), an NCAVP member program, told the San Francisco Examiner that, "We got an increase of calls in 1999 and already in 2000," which she attributed to the successful Proposition 22 initiative against same-gender marriage. "Hate speech completely fosters people's already existing fears and prejudices," she said.
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