Quote:
Hate crimes across Florida fell by 10 percent last year despite a big increase in attacks on gays, according to a report released Monday by state Attorney General Charlie Crist. Total hate crimes reported by local law enforcement agencies dropped from 306 in 2002 to 275 in 2003, but 20 percent were based on sexual orientation, the report says. Heddy Peña, executive director of SAVE Dade, a human rights organization, said that in 2003, gays and lesbians made ''significant progress in the courts,'' including a U.S. Supreme Court decision to decriminalize sexual behavior and a Massachussetts Supreme Court decision removing barriers to same-sex marriage. These decisions, said Peña, could have created a backlash. Municipalities report their statistics to counties, counties report to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and FDLE reports to the attorney general.
STATS BY COUNTY Hillsborough County led the state with 45 reported hate crimes, displacing Broward, with 32, which had led the state for the past three years. Pinellas followed with 31, more than twice the 15 that Miami-Dade reported. However, the city of Miami Police Department was not among the six local agencies that forwarded statistics to the county.
It couldn't immediately be determined why the department didn't send data. In all, 31 counties reported hate crimes, down from 34 in 2002. But the report notes it's unclear whether the counties that didn't report had no hate crimes, victims didn't report them to local police, or police classified them as something other than hate crimes. The state began compiling the statistics in 1991 to keep track of violent crimes like murder, arson, assault, vandalism and rape motivated by animosity based on race, color, age, religion, sexual orientation, disability or ethnicity. Likewise, it tracks nonviolent crimes like bribery, for example of a bank officer, to deny mortgages to minority applicants. Although the report says that race motivated nearly half of reported incidents -- 49.1 percent -- it was only the second time since 1991 that it accounted for less than half of all crimes. But adding ethnicity/national origin incidents increased race-related crimes to 67.6 percent of the total. Hate crimes against people still far outpace crimes against property, according to the report, although the gap closed slightly in 2003, when crimes against people dropped from 72 percent of the total to 68 percent.
In a telephone interview from Tallahassee Monday, Crist said he was ''in general encouraged'' by the numbers, because ``any time there's less of a bad thing, it bodes well for the future.'' On what he called ``the positive side, hate crimes have been declining related to race, and religious-based crimes fell more than 17 percent . . . But hate crime exists, and the best way to stop it is to be aware of it.''
Ah, my favorite word, "percent".