CSUSB professor comments on faith groups fighting hate crimes

CSUSB News

Bomb threats have been known to empty entire office buildings, shut down schools or bring dozens of police officers to a scene. But in some mosques around the country, voicemails threatening mass murder are ignored, not reported.
"I often hear, 'We got a voicemail. Someone said they're going to kill us all.' When I ask what they did, they say, 'We hit delete,'" said Corey Saylor, director of the department to monitor and combat Islamophobia for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR.








The American Muslims he's meeting with don't have a death wish, he added. They've just become numb to the threat. If something horrible happens often enough, it starts feeling inevitable, like it's not worth fighting.
Part of Saylor's job is to convince people that contacting the police about alleged hate crimes benefits their entire community, not just those threatened.
"We’re trying to make sure that people understand why not ignoring what happened to them is helpful to other people," he said.
Saylor is part of a growing movement of religious people and organizations, including law enforcement, working to expose the "hidden figure of crime," a phrase that refers to an estimated 125,000 alleged bias-related incidents that police never hear about each year. These activists ease victims' fears about law enforcement and facilitate police reports, addressing the biggest roadblock to understanding why hate crimes happen: underreporting.
"If we don’t measure the problem, we can’t solve the problem," said Rajdeep Singh Jolly, interim managing director of programs for the Sikh Coalition.
Between 2011 and 2015, more than half of alleged hate crimes went unreported to law enforcement agencies, according to a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.


Half of hate crimes aren't reported to police. How can faith groups help? | Heather Tuttle, Deseret News











In 4 in 10 of these cases, victims said they didn't involve the ...

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