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On the federal level, the Community Relations Service of the Department of Justice (CRS) organized and sponsored numerous cultural competency training sessions nationwide after September 11 for a wide range of federal employees, including congressional staffers, FBI agents, and federal civil rights officials." These forums usually involved presentations by members of the Muslim and Sikh faiths on aspects of their faiths and cultures that may impact the work of federal officials. The sessions typically ended with a question and answer period. On the local level, cultural competency training often was done "on the fly" with government officials and police officers learning about relevant cultural traits of the various communities as

they worked with them after September 11.228 In Seattle for example, the police force did not have any training on Muslim practices for police officers. Instead, officers who worked with these communities learned about basic Muslim beliefs as they visited city mosques after September 11.229

In the Dearbor Police Department, language barriers have been overcome by the appointment of an Arab community police officer who speaks Arabic,232 At the national level, the Civil Rights Division has made a concerted effort to publish brochures explaining civil rights protections in the languages of the backlashaffected communities. The brochures, written in languages such as Arabic, Farsi, and Punjabi, have been distributed in the Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian communities by mailing them to community organizations and places of worship. The Civil Rights Division states that it has mailed thousands of these brochures to affected community groups since September 11." They are also available on the Civil Rights Division website.

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Asian community with whom the Civil Rights Division could work once it was clear that those communities were vulnerable to backlash violence." In the Sikh and South Asian communities the CRS was in many cases the first federal government agency to ever contact them.235 The Civil Rights Division appointed specific persons to undertake outreach with each of the affected communities. These persons took calls from community leaders, e-mailed news of progress in backlash-related matters to community e-mail listserves, and spoke at eight community forums organized by the Civil Rights Division nationwide on September 11-related civil rights issues. Leaders of community organizations reported a very high level of satisfaction with their access to liaisons and ability to discuss urgent matters with them.2 The Civil Rights Division was generally known for having an "open door policy" in which "a meeting with division heads can be arranged anytime there is an issue of pressing concern.'

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Community organizations in New York, especially in the Muslim, South Asian, and Sikh community expressed frustration in their level of interaction with the New York City Police Department and other city officials who might have been of assistance on hate crime issues. Especially in the Sikh and South Asian communities, civil rights activists stated that there was only one community police officer in the whole police department assigned to interact with members of the huge Sikh and South Asian communities. Furthermore, Sikh and South Asian community leaders stated that in general government agencies had not organized any forums for the community members to educate them on police protections from hate crimes and that community members did not know who to contact if they were a victim of a hate crime."

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Creation of Hotlines on Hate Crimes

Some cities and states as well as the federal government created specific hate crime hotlines to give affected community members a point of contact in government when backlash hate crimes occurred. Seattle, Arizona, California, and, at the federal level, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, all created and advertised the creation of September 11-related hate crimes hotlines. Community organizations generally reported satisfaction with the hotlines, stating that they were important in letting victim communities know that they could easily contact government.

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by numerous Arab, Muslim, and South Asian organizations as a means to complain about hate crimes to the federal government. The number listed on the press release, however, was incorrect, forwarding callers to a dating service." Once the correct number was released by the commission three days later, the commission received approximately 140 calls from September 17 to October 2 that it considered possible hate crimes.2 Nevertheless, many persons who called the line did not understand that their complaints would not be forwarded to federal law enforcement authorities. The commission, when requested by Civil Rights Division to forward reports of hate crimes to it or the FBI, refused to do so. The commission maintained that it needed to protect the callers' anonymity so that they would not be discouraged from calling the commission. It also insisted it was an information gathering service rather than a complaint referral service."

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reporting statute is the most important hate crime law. It has pushed law enforcement to train police officers to detect bias-motivations for crimes in communities... It has revolutionized awareness of hate crime issues by creating a measure of accountability in communities."47 Under UCR, law enforcement authorities around the United States are asked to aggregate the number of hate crime incidents by offense type and the racial, religious, national origin or sexual orientation of the victim every quarter and report these totals to the FBI. These local reports are compiled by the FBI and published yearly by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the form of simple data on the number of hate crimes committed each year in a particular jurisdiction and the number of hate crimes committed against a particular victim type in each jurisdiction. The Bureau of Justice Statistics report is the only government-produced national snapshot on hate crimes each year.

Over the past eight years, the FBI has encouraged local jurisdictions to report incidents of crime, including hate crime, using the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The NIBRS reporting system provides more than a simple summary count of the number of hate crimes committed in each jurisdiction and the victim type. Under incidentbased reporting, local law enforcement agencies provide an individual record for each crime reported to the FBI. Details about each incident include detailed information on the type of offender, victim, offense, weapon used, and location of the offense.

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had no hate crimes each year. Nevertheless, the study found that many of those jurisdictions had hate crimes that were not reported to the FBI. This "false-zero" reporting to the FBI is so severe that the study estimated six thousand hate crimes, almost 75 percent again as much as the total number of hate crimes reported nationwide each year to the FBI, are not included in reports to the FBI Further complicating matters with regard to tracking anti-Arab violence is that the FBI does not track specific ethnic community hate crimes, instead generically classifying any anti-ethnic violence into a single ethnic crime category.

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City and State Hate Crime Tracking

In addition to federal efforts to collect hate crime data, a handful of city and state agencies in the United States also collect and publish their own hate crime statistics. Most notable among these are California, Illinois, Chicago, and Los Angeles County, which all publish detailed statistics each year on hate crimes.

The law enforcement agencies in the cities researched for this report-Dearborn, Chicago, Seattle. Los Angeles, Phoenix, and New York all participate in the UCR system at the federal level. Some cities and states, like California and Chicago, also have specially tracked and published statistics on September 11-related bias crimes, while others, like Seattle and New York, did not. The Office of the Attorney General for California was the most aggressive in collecting data on September 11-related hate crimes and widely publishing it. The California attorney general's office issued two "Interim Reports" listing the number of September 11related bias on hate crimes against Arab and Muslims and those perceived to be Arab or Muslim in six large California cities. The attorney general published the data because he believed the information was "central to developing ef

In addition to making a special effort to track and publish September 11-related crimes, California also publishes a yearly hate crimes report containing detailed statistical data on the type of hate crimes occurring, the victims, the offenders, location of attacks, and prosecution rates. The yearly report for the year 2001 was published on September 18, 2002. The report found that: "the overall number of hate crimes reported last year actually would have decreased five percent from a year earlier if not for the bias-motivated assaults against Californians victimized because they are Muslim or appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent."

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The Chicago Police Department has published a comprehensive annual hate crimes report since 1995. On June 27, 2002, it issued its annual "Hate Crimes in Chicago Report.' The report stated that Chicago police separately tracked September 11-related hate crimes and listed the number of September 11-related hate crimes in Chicago. Like the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations and the California attorney general's annual hate crime reports, the Chicago Police Department report includes information on the type of victims, the offenders, location of attacks, and types of hate crimes occurring, but it does not contain data on prosecution rates.

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Neither New York nor Seattle publish yearly data on hate crimes. The Bias Crimes Unit of the New York City Police Department did, however, track the number of September 11-related hate crimes in the three months after September 11 for internal investigatory purposes. Seattle did not track such data, and indeed, unlike any city researched for this report, did not track September 11-related hate crimes at all. The only published data on hate crimes in New York and Seattle is the data published yearly by the FBI in its annual hate crimes report. This data, as described above, is cursory in nature, providing only the number of hate crimes committed each year and the types of victims attacked. Information on hate crime perpetrators, the location of attacks, the type of crimes committed, or prosecution rates is not included in the Uniform Crime Reporting system used by New York City and Seattle.