Who is targeted in racial bias crimes?

Today we’re looking at Oregon’s Bias Response Hotline (BRH; data and full report here) from 2024. I have three main takeaways - scroll down to read them.

First let’s get some definitions out of the way. Reports to the hotline are categorized as bias crimes if the event involved damage to property, physical contact on any level (including spitting), or explicit threat of any of those. 

Reports are bias incidents if the event included hostile expressions towards someone due to their protected class. And some reports don’t meet either criteria (we’re not talking about those today).

Now, let’s look at what the data has to say about who is targeted in racial bias crimes.

There are more victims of crimes targeting Black people than there are total victims identifying as Black in this data.

I initially thought this was a mistake with the data, but this is accurate and real. Sometimes, someone who isn’t Black is the victim of an anti-Black bias crime (or incident). Only 114 out of the 148 victims of anti-Black bias crimes actually identify as Black.

Sometimes, a person commits an anti-Black hate crime against someone who isn’t Black just because they made a wrong assumption. Other times, a non-Black bystander is pulled into an anti-Black bias event, perhaps attempting to disrupt race-motivated violence.

There are three bias incidents for every bias crime.

I spend a lot of time thinking about institutional racism and implicit bias - these have a large impact on injustice, but they can be hard to address because they are often more subtle or subconscious. These reports are talking about a different type of behavior - direct, interpersonal, explicit racism.

Surveys suggest 1/3 to 1/2 of people in non-white racial categories have experienced interpersonal discrimination or slurs in their lives. If you think of racism as a mountain, bias crimes and incidents are the peaks. And underneath those most extreme and visible expressions of racism is the foundation that those peaks are built upon.

Finally…what exactly is this report talking about?

It was a bit buried in the report but it’s pretty simple - BRH hotline workers take what is said in the reports at face value, so they aren’t technically investigating. This data is an important piece to the puzzle but it’s not perfect. A good statewide survey would go a long way here to see the full scope of bias crime and incidents in Oregon.

If an experienced researcher has to go digging through “Bias Crimes (2024) Report Per Senate Bill 577 (2019)” to find out the most fundamental basics of what the numbers actually mean, it’s fair to question whether this data is as useful as it could be to the busy legislators and staff for whom this report was written - let alone the public.

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