ADVANCE FOR USE SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 2016 AND THEREAFTER -In this Dec. 11, 2015 photo, Barbara Hicks Collins talks of her upbringing, in her childhood home, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, in honor of her father, civil rights activist Robert Hicks, in Bogalusa, La. The home was both the site of mobilization of civil rights activism, and the target of Ku Klux Klan hostility. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)BOGALUSA, La. – The knock on the door, strong and quick, jolted Barbara Hicks Collins awake. Someone must be in trouble, she thought. She flung open her front door to the shocking sight of her car engulfed in flames.
Investigators later determined someone had set fire to her Mercedes and also tried to burn down the one-story brick house she shared with her mother in this eastern Louisiana town, once known as a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity. Hicks Collins, a black woman, had no doubt the fire – set on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2012 – was racially motivated. Her father had been a prominent civil rights leader, and her family remained active in the community.
Despite the circumstances, the case was never counted in the nation’s annual tally of hate crimes. In fact, neither the police department nor the local sheriff has filed a hate crime report with the FBI since at least 2009.
And that’s not unusual, an investigation by The Associated Press found. The AP identified almost 2,800 city police and county sheriff’s departments across the country that have not submitted a single hate crime report for the FBI’s annual crime tally during the past six years – about 17 percent of all city and county law enforcement agencies nationwide.
Advocates worry that the lack of a comprehensive, annual accounting disguises the extent of bias crimes at a time of heightened racial, religious and ethnic tensions. The nation was stunned last June when nine black parishioners were shot dead at a Charleston, S.C., church, and community groups have reported a notable increase in violence against Muslims and mosques in the wake of last year’s terror acts in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. Gay and transgender people also are regular targets.