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On the April 28th 2017 episode of the On The Media podcast, I heard about this intitiative from one of its developers. Victims and witnesses work with ProPublica to report crimes who in turn work with news agencies who want an accurate picture of the climate of hatred within the US.

The 2016 election left many in America afraid – of intolerance and the violence it can inspire. The need for trustworthy facts on the details and frequency of hate crimes and other incidents born of prejudice has never been more urgent.

At this point, there is simply no reliable national data on hate crimes. And no government agency documents lower-level incidents of harassment and intimidation, such as online or real-life bullying. Documenting and understanding all of these incidents – from hate-inspired murders to anti-Semitic graffiti to racist online trolling – requires new, more creative approaches.

That's why we have marshaled a national coalition of news organizations, civil-rights groups and technology companies intent on creating a database of reported hate crimes and bias incidents.

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. In addition to us, the project's growing list of partners include The Google News Lab, Univision News, the New York Times Opinion Section, WNYC, BuzzFeed News, First Draft, Meedan, New America Media, The Root, Latino USA, The Advocate, and Ushahidi. We're also working with civil-rights groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, and schools such as the University of Miami School of Communication.

We will for the first time be able to take a rigorous look at hate crimes in America – combining data analysis, social media newsgathering, and ambitious investigative storytelling.

You can follow along with the project on Facebook and Twitter. We'll use these to share good journalism about hate crimes, and to let you know what the partners in our project learn along the way. If you've got tips you think we should share, definitely let us know.

An African-American homeless man slain with a sword on the streets of New York. A mosque attacked in Fort Collins, Colorado, its windows smashed by a man who finished off his assault by hurling a Bible inside the Muslim house of worship. A portion of Junction City, Wisconsin, evacuated after a man angry with his Hmong neighbor opened fire. A man arrested in Port St. Lucie, Florida, for trying to set fire to a convenience store he suspected was owned by a Muslim, after which he said he'd just been trying to ”do his part for America."

That happened in the month of March in America. In fact, just a flavor of it.

There was also the Jewish cemetery vandalized in Rochester, New York. The man beaten with a pipe in a restaurant in Salem, Oregon, by an attacker who said, ”Arab, you need to leave." The African-American family in Delano, Minnesota, who moved out of their home just months after moving in after it was ransacked and spray painted with epithets.

Earlier this year, ProPublica and a coalition of newsrooms set out to chronicle and report on hate crimes in the United States. The project, ”Documenting Hate," was meant to provide some reliable information about an issue that has caused considerable alarm but been plagued by a lack of comprehensive data and sustained reporting.

With the help of civil rights groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and technology companies such as Google, First Draft Media and Meedan, we've been building a database of hate incidents — ranging from swastika vandalism to verbal insults to physical assaults. ProPublica and our media partners are working on authenticating these reports and spreading the word about how victims can share their stories.

It has been a grim accounting for some 170 reporters and editors from more than 40 newsrooms involved in ”Documenting Hate."

...

Minorities have faced verbal abuse on public transportation, with numerous reports coming from New York City. The New York Times opinion section reported on two women of color who were harassed on the New York subway, and Univision wrote about a spate of verbal assaults against minorities on the public transportation system. The New York City Commission on Human Rights saw a 480 percent increase in reports of discriminatory harassment on New York's subways between 2015 and 2016, the Times found.

Schools and universities are confronting hate, too. We've received a number of reports about xenophobic incidents involving Latino children in schools, which Univision covered. White supremacy groups are using college campuses to spread their message, as ProPublica and The New York Times opinion section reported. And as Univision wrote, in some cases students are fighting back.

Victims have also reported being targeted in the workplace. A Massachusetts woman opened up to Univision about receiving a racist letter on her newspaper route, and a Venezuelan business owner saw his Seattle restaurant vandalized so many times that he gave up hanging a flag outside. And a St. Louis librarian told The Huffington Post about receiving an anti-Semitic voicemail at her job. We've also seen reports of hate online, like the case of a Jewish man in New Mexico facing an onslaught of hateful threats, reported by The New York Times opinion section.

...

As part of the ”Documenting Hate" project, Google News has been compiling news articles about confirmed or potential hate crimes from across the country. One can select a week or a month, and be awash in reports of hate crimes — of arrests and arraignments, opened investigations and final sentences.

We happened to select March, but there's little to suggest any month would be that different.

Articles on the lack of data surrounding hate crimes:

The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 40 percent of hate crime victims don't report the crime to authorities.

Cassidy: There was one person that I spoke with, Brandon White. He was basically jumped outside of a convenience store here in Atlanta by a group of young men yelling gay slurs. After the beating, he went home. He didn't call police. He went to sleep. It was the next day after a video of the attack had surfaced online and people had seen it and recognized him that he was confronted with this. He spoke about his fears, that he'd grown up in a rough neighborhood and there wasn't a lot of trust with police. There was a sense that when something happens, you take care of it yourself. When you look at those statistics that you cited, those were estimates by the Bureau of Justice Statistics at 40 percent are estimated not to report to police. They cite various reasons including fear of reprisal and the feeling that police won't do anything about it.

Reporting of statistics varies wildly from state to state.

Cassidy: Georgia, for instance, and Alabama, they had only about 10 percent to 12 percent of their local law enforcement agencies not reporting this information, but just a few states over in Louisiana and Mississippi, those are some of the highest totals of non-reporting agencies in the country. Louisiana at almost 59 percent and Mississippi just under 65 percent of all local law enforcement agencies that were not reporting this information. It definitely was indicative of what we found on a large scale, which is just ... There's really so much of a lack of uniformity when it comes to this reporting that you have these myriad of responses.

More than 3,000 state and local law enforcement agencies don't report hate crimes to the FBI as part of its annual national survey of crime in America. Professor Brian Levin, who heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, said the entire state of Hawaii fails to file any such reports.

And many of the law enforcement agencies that do choose to participate do not appear to be particularly rigorous about documenting hate crimes and passing that information onto the federal authorities.

”A lot of agencies just submit a piece of paper saying they had no hate crimes," added Levin, noting that the vast majority of police and sheriff's departments reported no hate crimes last year.

The data appears particularly spotty in much of the South, a region with a long history of racial strife. Police in Mississippi reported zero hate crimes in 2015. In Arkansas, the number was eight. In Alabama, it was 12.

It seems the number of hate crimes on college campuses is also undercounted by the FBI. The most recent statistics gathered by the U.S. Department of Education appear to show at least twice as many offenses occurring at colleges and universities as the FBI data.

The FBI ”data system is of little help to authorities who investigate and track hate crimes," wrote Ronald L. Davis, head of the Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, in an essay published earlier this year. ”This is a significant problem because, if the authorities do not know how many hate crimes are committed, they cannot get an accurate picture of whether hate crime laws are effective, which can lead to fewer resources allocated to combatting hate crimes."

An FBI spokesperson acknowledged that nearly 20 percent of law enforcement agencies don't participate in the program, but said the bureau was working ”to improve the data collection."

A key problem, said Phyllis Gerstenfeld, author of a well-known book on hate crimes, is that the FBI has no legal mechanism to compel law enforcement agencies to file crime reports or ensure that they submit accurate information.

PELLEGRINELLI: One of the lessons to be learned from the Lucero case is that the official hate crime statistics rarely give us the whole picture. In the FBI's newly released report for 2009, there were a total of 6,604 incidents across the United States, ranging from vandalism to homicide. About half of those incidents were motivated by a bias against the victim's race - the largest category. And smaller amounts by religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and disability.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center says the data isn't able to give us much more than a sense of the trends.

Mr. MARK POTOK (Southern Poverty Law Center): Are anti-Latino hate crimes going up? How bad is it to be a gay person in America? Who is the most attacked minority? But in terms of totals, I think they tell you absolutely nothing at all.

PELLEGRINELLI: Most experts would agree that those totals are low, although, it's hard to get a sense of how low. Victims don't always go to the police and the officers aren't always trained to recognize hate crimes. Daniel Roberts says the process of filing the statistics can be too labor intensive for many police departments. He's the assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division.

Mr. DANIEL ROBERTS (Assistant Director, FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division): They want to submit. They just don't have the resources often to be able to do that. And to be able to have someone dedicated to crime statistics.

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Jack McDevitt directs the Institute on Race Injustice at Northeastern University. He says there's an even bigger problem - many agencies report that there weren't any hate crimes, even when there were.

Mr. JACK MCDEVITT (Director, Institute on Race Injustice at Northeastern University): It is conceivable that a small town might not have a hate crime in a year. But we've had major cities like Detroit or New Orleans report zero for a year, which strains the credibility. And that isn't victims not coming forward, that's the police not taking it seriously.

PELLEGRINELLI: Last year, 47 cities with populations over 100,000 reported no hate crimes at all.

Mr. MCDEVITT: What you can't tell is whether - maybe they're helping the victims and they're not just recording the data and sending it to the feds. That's the hope, but maybe it's that they're ignoring the victims and not sending the data in to the feds, and that would be the worst case scenario.

Another reason for the lack of reporting of hate crimes may be many victims' reluctance to deal with the police, Levin said. ”Based on a history of animosity, black and Latino victims may see law enforcement as an ‘army of occupation'; immigrants may identify police with a tyrannical regime in their home country or be concerned about being deported; and gays and lesbians may perceive, rightly or not, that police officers are generally homophobic," he explained.

In addition, Levin said, victims with disabilities are often reluctant to report because they fear that their tormenters will retaliate. ”They may have psychiatric or intellectual deficits that seriously interfere with their capacity to recognize false friendships or to report crime," Levin said. ”Or they may assume a position of dependence in a relationship with caretakers who conceal their sadistic urges in the high credibility of their institutional roles." And this problem is a serious one. In 2011, only 58 of the 7,254 hate crimes reported to the FBI were aimed at people with disabilities. But when the Justice Department asked persons with disabilities anonymously why they believe they were targeted for violence, 14% — more than 30,000 people in all — said they thought it was because of their disability.

Documenting Hate - Where witnesses, victims and journalists can go to contact ProPublica. Also contains running list of stories from ProPublica and their partner organizations.
Unerased - A Similar Initiative by MIC About Compiling the Deaths of Transgender Individuals
We're Investigating Hate Across the U.S. There's No Shortage of Work. - ProPublica
Why Are Hate Crime Statistics So Poorly Tracked? - ProPublica (PODCAST, ~21 minutes)
Hate Crimes Are Up — But the Government Isn't Keeping Good Track of Them - ProPublica
Hate Crime Statistics Lack Key Facts - NPR (PODCAST, ~5 minutes w/ transcript)
DOJ Study: More Than 250,000 Hate Crimes a Year, Most Unreported - SPLC

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[EdibleKnife]

Recent hate crimes inspired a new article within NYT's This Week In Hate series. They discuss not only continued hate crime prevalence but how the Documenting Hate project has been useful not only to the journalists but individuals experiencing descrimination:

A black college student was fatally stabbed in College Park, Md., days before he would have graduated. Two men were killed and another wounded when they tried to stop a man's hateful rant on a train in Portland, Ore. This week, a home in Los Angeles owned by the N.B.A. star LeBron James was vandalized with racial slurs. ”We got a long way to go, for us as a society and for us as African­Americans, until we feel equal in America," Mr. James said at a news conference on Wednesday. ”Hate in America, especially for African­ Americans, is living every day." Though the frequency seems to have decreased since the beginning of the year, hate crimes like the attacks in Portland and the vandalism of Mr. James's home continue. More comprehensive data is needed, but reports to the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups over the past few months have revealed a few patterns.

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Incidents of harassment continue as well. Charles Cox was at a restaurant in Leavenworth, Kan., with his 3­ year­old daughter in early spring when he heard another patron say that now that Donald Trump is president, ”things are going to get cleaned up around here." The man was looking right at Mr. Cox, who is of Korean and European heritage. ”I think we all knew what he meant by it," he said. Racist harassment has long been a fact of life for Mr. Cox, who reported his experience to the Documenting Hate project, a partnership that includes ProPublica, The New York Times opinion section and other organizations. ”I've been called five to six different races," he said —
some people assume he is Latino and joke that he should be great at lawn maintenance.

...

Ms. Kim is one of many who have been told some variant of ”go back to your country" since the election, according to reports to the Documenting Hate project. As of February, more than 40 people had reported harassment involving some variation on the phrase to the website Univision, one of the Documenting Hate partners, which could not verify all reports. Those perceived to be immigrants were the most commonly targeted group in incidents of hate and harassment reported to the Southern Poverty Law Center, with 387 incidents categorized as anti­immigrant.

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Until she was harassed in March, Ms. Kim had never experienced anything like that in Brooklyn, where she has lived for about seven years. But since the election,
many people have reported harassment or abuse in left­leaning, diverse areas of the country. Nearly 150 of the more than 3,000 reports made to the Documenting Hate
project since the election involve incidents in New York City, though not all have been verified.

New York Times