Woods, the Oakland Police Department LGBTQ liaison, said she prepares herself to read the names of people she knows on the list of the year’s victims before each Transgender Day of Remembrance.

“If you run a transgender program anywhere, anywhere in the world, I can honestly say almost anywhere in the world, it’s not a matter of if somebody is going to get killed, it’s when,” Woods said.

Since 2016, at least 66 transgender people have been murdered in the United States, according to the Human Rights Campaign. A News21 analysis found more than half of the victims were people of color and at least 29 of the cases are still under investigation.

Only one case was classified as a hate crime by law enforcement, even when LGBTQ advocates and victims’ communities argued they were targeted for their gender identity.

Transgender victims’ cases are frequently complicated by the circumstances surrounding their deaths, which makes it difficult to classify their homicides as hate crimes. The victims are often killed by a romantic partner, sex work client or stranger.

“It’s important to remember that hate crimes occur in all sorts of different contexts. I think people often, when they think about them, they immediately go to something on a street outside a gay bar with a bunch of young men,” said anti-LGBTQ hate crimes expert Gregory Herek. “It’s a common scenario, but hate crimes are also committed in families, in the home, in schools, in the workplace and by all sorts of people.”

China Gibson, a 31-year-old African-American transgender woman, was shot in the back between eight and 10 times while exiting a shopping center in New Orleans in February 2017. Gibson’s mother, Tammie Lewis, and her sister, Iona Maxie, believe the murderer was a lover who hoped to conceal his sexual relationship with Gibson to avoid questions regarding his sexuality.

“I think China was killed because people want to live a certain lifestyle, but then have a closeted lifestyle that they don’t want to be outed about,” Maxie said. “China was a person, when she met men, she told them exactly who she was, and you have to decide going forward if that’s what you want to be a part of whether people find out or not. I just think the person just didn’t want people to find out. And that’s why China was killed.”

The New Orleans Police Department officers who responded to Gibson’s shooting did not categorize her murder as a hate crime in the incident report. In subsequent statements, law enforcement officials have said the murder is not being considered a hate crime.

Kevin Griffin, Gibson’s cousin, said while the details surrounding her murder are ambiguous, there’s little reason Gibson would have been targeted, making her gender identity a potential motive in her killing.

“This is one of those people who would give you the shirt off their back. People say that, because it’s cliché and cool, but this was the person China was,” Griffin said. “Would not do any harm to anyone. She just wanted to be who she was and she didn’t want any static or any friction so she wouldn’t give it.”

Even if law enforcement found Gibson’s killer and confirmed a gender identity bias motive in her murder, the ability to pursue hate crime charges on a state level is limited in Louisiana. While the state’s hate crime statute defines sexual orientation-based crimes as hate crimes, there is no such provision for gender bias-based crimes, leaving little legal recourse other than federal hate crime charges.

Other states like Louisiana without gender identity provisions have seen the most murders of transgender individuals in recent years. Since 2016, eight transgender people have been killed in Texas, six in Florida, and five in Ohio and Georgia. Seven transgender women were murdered in Louisiana during that time.

In states that can pursue hate crime charges in gender identity cases, justice is not always a guarantee.

California has hate crime and non-discrimination laws that cover individuals targeted for their gender identity or gender expression, but the state’s transgender population is still vulnerable.

Taja Gabrielle DeJesus, a 36-year-old transgender Latina woman from San Francisco, was stabbed to death in her apartment complex in February 2015. Neighbors reported hearing an argument between Taja and a man, and called the police, said Linda DeJesus, Taja’s mother.

When first responders arrived at the scene, they found Taja in the stairwell. She had been stabbed nine times and was pronounced dead. By the time officers found the man, who fled the apartment, he had committed suicide, DeJesus said.

Although DeJesus believes the murder was a hate crime, it wasn’t classified as such by investigators. She told News21 that detectives said the suspect, who was going through a divorce, was trying to reconcile with his ex-wife.

“They considered it an argument that got escalated, got out of control,” DeJesus said. “He killed her, and in my heart I believe that no, he didn’t want anyone to know that he was with a transgender woman.”

Before transgender individuals are victims of fatal violence, they can face a number of factors that put them at higher risk for hate, murder and discrimination.

A 2011 report published by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, two national LGBTQ advocacy groups, found more than 1,100 of the over 6,000 transgender respondents reported being homeless at some point. More than 950 said they had to find alternative sources of income, like drug trafficking or sex work, to survive.

Before she was killed, Taja was struggling to get by, and had turned to sex work to survive, her friend and sobriety sponsor Danielle Castro told News21. She said she ran into Taja while going home from work about two weeks before she died.

“I took her home to Bayview where she lived. She wanted me to see her place and the area felt unsafe, but we went inside and she had bare minimum,” Castro said. “I could tell she was really struggling.”

Among the challenges the transgender community faces, there’s also a lack of trust in law enforcement. The National Center for Transgender Equality survey reported that almost 3,000 respondents said they were uncomfortable reaching out to the police for help.

Woods, who trains Oakland Police Department officers to work with the LGBTQ population, said most law enforcement officers have a “very limited” perspective on the transgender community. Most, Woods said, only engage with transgender folks in an emergency response capacity or when a transgender individual is committing a crime.

Castro, who is also a transgender woman, told News21 she had a bad experience with police officers days after Taja DeJesus’ funeral.

Castro said she was sitting in front of a bar in the Castro District, a gay neighborhood in San Francisco, while a march against transphobia took place. The bar manager came out and told Castro to leave. When she refused, he shoved her.

“He was saying transphobic things, and I couldn’t believe that he put his hands on me and was so forceful when I was obviously disabled,” said Castro, who was dealing with hip problems at the time.

The manager called the police, and Castro said the officers refused to take her statement.

“The police came and they were awful. Just awful,” Castro said. “I wanted to file charges, but they said they couldn’t do a police report there because it was out of their district.”

Castro said she later found out the officers had lied to her, and could have done a police report there.

Of the 39 closed transgender murder cases recorded by the Human Rights Campaign since 2016, only one had hate crime charges filed by the local district attorney’s office. The police involved did not say if they investigated the case as a hate crime homicide.

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Before a New York judge sentenced Rasheen Everett to 29 years in prison for strangling Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar in 2010, his lawyer pleaded for a lighter punishment. According to him, Gonzalez-Andujar wasn’t on the “higher end of the community.”   

In January, Los Angeles police charged Kevyn Ramirez in the stabbing death of Viccky Gutierrez, who was stabbed to death before Ramirez allegedly burned her home, leaving her remains severely burned. Police couldn’t immediately identify her.

All of them were transgender cases in the news. All of them were sex workers. And none of their murders were initially charged as hate crimes.

LGBTQ advocates say society shuns transgender people from corporate jobs because of their gender identity, forcing them into survival sex work and other means of underground economy. But that places them in a dangerous trade.

According to the Trans Murder Monitoring Project, 62 percent of the 2,609 transgender people killed worldwide from January 2008 through September 2017 were sex workers.

In the United States, a 2015 survey from the National Center for Transgender Equality said one in five transgender adults surveyed said they participated in sex work, with higher rates among minority women. Of the 53 transgender people killed between 2013 and 2015, 34 percent participated in sex work at the time of their deaths, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Of the 14 transgender murders tracked by the Human Rights Campaign this year, at least two victims participated in sex work.

“It’s a nationwide problem that is happening all across the country and it is a direct result of transphobia and hate crimes, as well as the reasons that lead trans people to be in vulnerable situations,” said Victoria Rodríguez-Roldán, the trans and gender non-conforming justice project director for the National LGBTQ Task Force.

When transgender people feel they have no other avenue for income, they often sell their bodies, Rodríguez-Roldán said. Sex work can be defined as prostitution, pornography, services arranged online and other forms. Experts say prejudices in the workplace and housing lead transgender people to this point.

Currently, 28 states lack explicit laws prohibiting employment and housing discrimination regarding sexual orientation or gender identity. In 2015, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey found nearly 50 percent of transgender sex worker respondents experienced homelessness. Nearly 70 percent of respondents reported losing a job or being denied a promotion because of their identity.  

When they can’t secure a house or employment, transgender people feel they have no other choice but to partake in a dangerous craft such as sex work, said Kory Mansen, racial and economic justice policy advocate for the National Center for Transgender Equality.

“When you combine those factors, you get an amplified violence that these people experience at the intersection of that area of work and the trans identity,” he said.

Danielle Castro knows those factors too well because she’s lived it. Now, the 43-year-old Latina transgender woman enjoys a stable lifestyle. She lives in a house in Oakland, California with her two dogs. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at John F. Kennedy University, which is in the Bay Area.  She’s also project director at the Center for Excellence for Transgender Health.

But she participated in sex work for years before and after her transition into a female. When she hears horror stories of transgender sex workers’ murders, it resonates because “it could have been me,”she said.

“The reasons so many of us are engaging in sex work is because we don’t have other options to survive,” she said. “When you have a power to survive, that’s what you’re going to do. And when you get positive reinforcement from people that want to have sex with you and pay you, I’m not going to lie, it feels good.

“The sad part about it, though, is that people think we’re disposable because of it.”

Experts and data suggest transgender sex workers generally distrust law enforcement. Eighty-six percent of transgender sex worker respondents reported being harassed, attacked, sexually assaulted or mistreated in some way by police, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. Add the fact that the more lucrative sex work acts, such as prostitution, are illegal, and it deters transgender sex workers from approaching police to report violence.  

“What often happens is sex workers are disproportionately subject to crimes, but they’re less likely to report them because they’re afraid of retaliation on the part of police officers,” said Sheryl Evans Davis, executive director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. “And we’ve heard anecdotally that, ‘I was robbed and I went to report it to a police officer and the police officer asked me, oh, were you doing sex work?’ So there was this victimizing the victim dynamic that was happening.”

When reported crimes happen, though, it’s harder to convict perpetrators of a hate crime, experts say. A hate crime charge automatically increases a typical punishment for states with applicable laws.

In Gonzalez-Andujar’s and Williams’ brutal murders, hate crime charges weren’t brought. Law enforcement couldn’t definitively prove motivation, according to news reports.

Gutierrez’s death, though still under investigation, was not immediately charged as a hate crime.  

For transgender sex workers, other issues complicate proving a hate crime, and each case is unique. It is hard to prove victims were explicitly targeted for their gender, or if other circumstances, such as domestic violence, led to their deaths or mistreatment, Mansen said

“It is so difficult to get things tried as a hate crime because there are a lot of factors into proving the intent, so more often than not law enforcement doesn’t feel equipped to make the determination of whether something is or is not a hate crime,” Mansen said.

Of the four transgender sex worker deaths tracked by the Human Rights Campaign in 2015, none were charged as hate crimes.

Often, after a hate crime charge isn’t levied, the transgender community sees it as a failure.

As the leader of an advocacy group who works closely with the LGBTQ community and police, Davis said she sees both sides.

“It’s a really tough and emotional debate,” Davis said. “With most crimes, you have to prove the intent. But with hate crimes, you have to prove the intent, the act and then the motivation to do it.”

“There have been these moments when people are calling it out there in the streets and they’re saying that, ‘this is a hate crime’ and there’s a struggle with proving it.”

Victoria Rodríguez-Roldán agreed, saying the intricacies of each situation make it difficult to label each case hate-related. But to her, the biggest goal should be fixing the systemic issue that leads to these events.

“I think it’s a mix of many things that makes this so complex, often because they’re trans, often because they’re vulnerable in engaging in criminalized form of making a living,” she said. “But I’m not sure it matters. What matters is transgender people are being murdered.”

In recent years, LGBTQ advocacy groups publicly called for decriminalization of sex work, though federal legislation to crackdown on online services passed this year. Advocates say while national policy battles continue, local communities can take action. And two cities are leading the charge.

Sophie Cadle, a 23-year-old youth liaison at the New York Transgender Advocacy Group, said her organization now works more with police to build relationships and help officers understand the societal factors involved with sex work. As a black transgender woman who participated in sex work, she said it’s important to be proactive.

“The violence toward the community is visible,” she said. “It’s there and it’s a continuous issue that’s affecting us.”

In San Francisco, sex workers who report experiencing or seeing violence won’t face prostitution charges because of a policy adopted in January by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and the San Francisco Police Department.  The ‘Prioritizing Safety for Sex Workers’ is the first of its kind in the nation, and is a collaborative effort to encourage reporting of violent crime.

Corinne Greene, policy coordinator for the Transgender Law Center, said this should build trust. Proving intent regarding hate crimes will always be tough. But if sex workers can courageously approach police, she said, it will help reduce deaths and mistreatment.

“A big factor in how law enforcement can improve is learning about trans people, gaining cultural competence on trans people, learning about sex workers, investigating and trying to eliminate inherent bias most people have against trans people and sex workers not engaging in profiling,” she said. “Really focusing on improving community relations would be huge in terms of helping sex workers feel more comfortable accessing police.”

Danielle Castro has advice for people who are in the sex business.

“I hope people are safe and learn to protect themselves before they come into this trade that can be potentially deadly,” she said. “And if you’re doing it for survival, then God bless you.”

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It’s not surprising — LGBTQ acceptance here is common knowldege. Life Magazine labeled San Francisco the “Gay Capital of the World” in 1964, and since then, it has earned the moniker. Most notably, San Francisco issued the nation’s first same-sex marriage license in 2004, helping catalyze the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision 11 years later. One would think the LGBTQ community constantly feels safe here.

But advocates and newly released data suggest otherwise.

Hate crimes in California increased 17 percent in 2017, with hate crime events motivated by sexual orientation increasing by 19 percent, according to a California Attorney General report. A total of 246 hate crimes involving sexual orientation happened in California last year, encompassing 22 percent of all hate crimes statewide.

San Francisco County saw a 31 percent spike in total hate crimes, the same report said. Data from the Anti-Defamation League cites 14 hate crimes targeted for sexual orientation occurred in San Francisco in 2016. That’s nearly 40 percent of all of the hate crimes in the city and was the highest number the organization reported since 2012.

Seth Brysk, regional director for the ADL’s Central Pacific Region, called this trend “disturbing.”

“While it is true that there are greater freedoms and a greater measure of acceptance more broadly, there’s still exists the same kinds of societal ills that you find in other communities and other locations,” Brysk said. “We find in the work that we’re doing that in terms of hate crimes, in terms of hatred that’s visited against the LGBTQ community and other communities, that it exists here in as much as it does in any other place.”

Brysk said the coarse rhetoric during the 2016 presidential election gave people a “license to speak their bigoted beliefs” and then act on them without fear for repercussions. But in San Francisco, anti-LGBT sentiments were present before then, according to a survey the year before.

In 2015, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission surveyed 400 LGBTQ individuals, finding that 68 percent of respondents experienced physical violence. More than 47 percent of respondents reported experiencing sexual violence and 81 percent reported experiencing harassment.

Sneh Rao, director of policy for the commission’s Policy and Social Justice Division, said those numbers show the LGBTQ community is still vulnerable despite San Francisco’s progressive culture.

“San Francisco’s done a lot of good work, but there is no doubt, as this report showed, that there is a lot of good work that still needs to be done,” he said.

San Francisco’s LGBTQ community also distrusts of the police. The survey found a third of LGBTQ people in San Francisco are leery of law enforcement.

This worries Brysk. Agencies such as the ADL rely heavily on accurate data, and law enforcement can be invaluable partners. Data that police gather help advocacy and government groups see the presence of hate crimes in a given location. That then leads to efforts and drafted policies to address certain areas or comfort specific groups.

When LGBTQ people don’t report criminal events to law enforcement, it skews the data, making it unreflective of the actual problem, Brysk said. That’s why the ADL’s numbers are so low. When large cities report so few hate crimes, it raises concerns.

“We need good information, Brysk said. “It’s important for law enforcement to do everything possible in their power to make it as comfortable and as easy as possible for people to feel comfortable and willing to go and report these crimes.

“We have to try to break down those barriers. We have to try to improve the training so the law enforcement can provide us with that kind of information and that will help inform education and policy making decisions and the drafting of other statutes that might be able to help protect people.”

More than 36 percent of respondents to the Human Rights Commission survey said they don’t believe police would help them in an emergency. One anonymous respondent even wrote, “There’s a joke in my building – you can get pizza delivered to you faster than the police respond.”

And because of that, hate crime data is not true depiction, Rao said. Forty-four percent of respondents said they did not report physical violence events to the police, while 62 percent didn’t report harassment.

Clair Farley, senior advisor for transgender initiatives for the mayor of San Francisco, said perceived biases and anecdotal accounts of police harassing or discrediting LGBTQ individuals leads to a sense of fear. Though she said the San Francisco Police Department started new initiatives to combat this, such as bias trainings and community discussions, she said the process will take time.

“There’s been a lot of work with the new recruits around LGBT trainings and trans work, which is great for the new recruits, but for oldtimers and people who have been on the force for a long time, it’s harder to change.”

Some in the LGBTQ community confide in advocacy groups rather than police. But even those numbers are still small. Only 16 percent of respondents said they sought help from a group that assisted with legal services and advocacy. Those who utilized those services, though, were pleased. Seventy-one percent of those who used those services said they were helpful. The objective now is to reach more people in order to better serve them.

“The mission now is to decide how do we have this dialogue outside of just saying ‘we’re going to empower you, but we’re going to actually go with you and help represent you?” said Sheryl Evans Davis, executive director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. “We need allies in those rooms — hopefully we’re doing work to develop allies so that it’s not only you know certain people saying we all deserve to be treated fairly but that we can speak up on behalf of those who are feeling afflicted”

Both the ADL and HRC said success in this area is seeing an increase of reported hate crimes. They want to ensure there isn’t a boost in criminal activity, but seeing a truer dataset will present a clearer picture of the areas they need to improve on.

But No. 1 on Brysk’s list is to get the word out that hate is still a problem in San Francisco — even if there are rainbow flags everywhere.

“A big thing we have to do is shine a light on the problem, making sure that people understand that hatred exists,” he said. “It’s a very real problem — it’s a pressing issue and it’s a growing problem, and therefore it should be a growing concern for everyone. Hatred never confined itself to one group or one area.”

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FREMONT, Ohio — Dustin McLochlin of  Fremont, Ohio, curator of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums, isn’t surprised that racial issues still persist in America today.

Of the 442 hate crimes reported to the FBI by Ohio police in 2016, 336 were related to race. Most of these crimes occurred in three of the state’s largest cities: 123 in Columbus, 32 in Cincinnati and 31 in Toledo.

“The one thing that you’ll notice when you study American history on a long-enough timeframe is that the one issue that holds all of that together is racism and racial relations,” he said. “We see ebbs and flows, and obviously we see stuff going on today.”

McLochlin works at Fremont’s historic point of pride: the 25-acre estate containing the home, burial site, library and museum of Hayes, the 19th U.S. president.

News21’s road warriors found the historic site to be a good place to talk about race in America.

When Hayes took office in 1877, the final vestiges of the Civil War were disappearing as the Reconstruction Era reached its conclusion. Federal troops only remained in South Carolina and Louisiana. In exchange for his presidency, Hayes agreed to withdraw all federal troops from the South in a deal with Southern Democrats known as the Compromise of 1877.

The shift in control quickly laid the foundation for Jim Crow laws that would oppress and brutalize black Southerners for nearly a century, until federal civil rights legislation was passed in the 1950s and 1960s.

“Hayes hoped that, by finally ending the struggles of the Civil War, there were enough former Whigs and Republicans in the South to not lead to 80 years of oppression, but he was wrong,” McLochlin said.

McLochlin said the effects of systemic racism and division are still present in America.

Several museum visitors shared the same view.

Jim Ryan, a resident of upstate New York who was visiting the museum for the first time, said politics are driving the country apart.

“I absolutely think that there’s controversy in this country, but, in all fairness, there’s been controversy in this country from day one,” he said. “The two-party system – which we’ve always had – you can’t get them to work together. They’re not doing their job, and they haven’t for quite a while.”

Fremont native Chandra Palm, visiting the museum with her friend Julie Bellfy from Toledo, agreed that America has struggled with “conflicts from the very beginning,” but said social media contributes to the divisiveness today.

“Since we’re more plugged-in to things, people are seeing it more instead of sitting on your back porch talking to your neighbors or talking to your family,” Bellfy said. “It becomes more explosive.”

Palm and Bellfy don’t have Facebook accounts. They said the posts seemed to be driving people apart, not together.

Palm said the division in the country seems louder because of today’s technology and all the social media.

“We’re just hearing it more, but it’s always been there,” Palm said.

Law enforcement agencies across the U.S. reported to the FBI a national total of 7,615 hate crime victims in 2016. A total of 4,426 of the victims were targeted because of their race. Fifty percent were victims of anti-black bias, and 11 percent were victims of anti-Latino bias.

“The racial struggles, not just black and white, but the immigrant story, and all of these interactions between different people with different backgrounds and how that plays with each other – that is the story of America,” McLochlin of the presidential library said. “That is the story of America.”

News21 fellow Storme Jones contributed to this report.

Follow the News21 blog for updates as the team reports on the road.

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The Trans Lives Matter: A Call for Justice rally on June 27 mourned three black transgender women who have been murdered in Jacksonville since February. Celine Walker, 36, was killed Feb. 4 in a hotel room. Antash’a English, 38, was the victim of a June 1 drive-by shooting. Cathalina Christina James, 24, was fatally shot in a Jacksonville hotel June 24.

The Human Rights Campaign reports that 14 transgender people have been murdered in the U.S. since the start of 2018. A total of 28 were murdered in 2017.

“We are afraid, and we feel alone,” said rally speaker AJ Jamerson, a leader with the Jacksonville Transgender Action Committee. “We don’t feel heard, and we feel small. We try to work with the people and the systems in power, but it doesn’t feel like they want to work with us. … We are forced into dangerous situations to survive, and we are punished for existing.”

Organizers of the rally protested the response by the city of Jacksonville and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, organizers of the rally said. The sheriff’s office initially reported the murder of a man in the case of each woman’s death, misgendering the victims based on their gender identities at birth. The city and the sheriff’s office have not released a statement acknowledging the murders.

Chris Hancock, a public information officer with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, told News21 that the sheriff’s office identifies victims based on their official government IDs.

“We’re given what we’re given,” Hancock said. “These individuals, if they wanted to be known by a different name than what’s on their official government ID, then that’s a process they could have undertaken, but they failed to.”

The sheriff’s office does not have a liaison that works directly with the local LGBTQ community — a position found in an increasing number of police departments across the nation and in other Florida police departments such as Fort Lauderdale, Gainesville, Orlando and Miami Beach.

In the months since the first murder, the transgender community’s fears have escalated, said Jamerson and other organizers of the protest.

The sheriff’s office has not announced suspects in any of the murders, and Hancock could not comment on possible hate or bias motivation in the killings as they are still open investigations.

Several LBGTQ activists at the rally said they believe the murders are hate crimes, and brought up the possibility of a serial killer targeting Jacksonville’s transgender community.

“I understand that there is protocol and procedure… I get it. But there’s still a way to do everything,” said local activist and speaker Chloie Kensington at the rally. “So I am calling on … our chief of police, our mayor, as well as the city council to denounce these murders, to condemn them and call them what they are: heinous hate crimes.”

Rally speakers called for protection, both from other community members and from the Jacksonville Sheriff. Some expressed frustration at the 2017 designation of $4.4 million to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office to hire new officers, and at least one called for the resignation of Sheriff Mike Williams.

“You took an oath and a duty to protect and defend, and you have not protected, neither have you stood up and defended,” said speaker Stanley McAllister.

Jimmy Midyette, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida in Jacksonville, said the ACLU, Equality Florida and other local activist groups will be meeting soon with the sheriff and other his department’s leaders to discuss their policies and communication with the public.

Midyette said he also hopes for a public meeting between the transgender community and the Sheriff’s Office soon, and that the sheriff knows that there’s a community that’s in pain and he doesn’t like that.

“Everyone in the community deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, and the police can’t do their jobs if they’re not encouraging and building a sense of community and respect from the community that they police,” Midyette said.

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Eighty-eight percent of the lynchings occurred across 10 Southern states, according to “Lynching in America,” a 2017 report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal advocacy group out of Montgomery, Alabama.

The lynching era’s legacy can still be seen today, historians and politicians say. Three black senators introduced legislation this week to make lynchings a federal crime, saying it is long past due.

Stewart Tolnay, a sociology professor at University of Washington,  said states with the most lynchings now have higher homicide rates, increased imprisonments, more church burnings and a greater number of death penalty sentences.  

 “Data shows that lynchings created the underlying social conditions that create hate and racism today,” Tolnay said.

During the lynching era, E.M. Beck, a sociology professor at University of Georgia, said anger from the Civil War, competition for jobs and a rise of African-Americans as public figures led to increased violence against African-Americans.

“There was a rise in white supremacy to the point where whites did not view blacks as human, and also a generalized, widespread understanding that mob violence was necessary because of recent history,” Beck said.

African-American men were lynched for standing up against oppression, speaking to white women and committing minor social transgressions, according to the Lynching in America report. Of the lynchings recorded, a total of 25 percent of the people who were lynched were accused of sexually assaulting a white woman and 30 percent were accused of murder. 

Lynchings became public spectacles, as hundreds and even thousands of people would gather to watch, Beck and Tolnay both said. Local newspapers would advertise the events, and food and drink carts would be present as African-American men would be tortured for hours before finally being lynched.

“There was actually no anti-lynching legislation in place federally,” Tolnay said. “So the federal government, which was against lynchings for the most part, could not step in to stop them.” 

Many anti-lynching bills were proposed in the early 20th century, including the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of 1918, which passed through the U.S. House of Representatives, but was halted by a series of filibusters by Southern senators. The U.S. government did not apologize for the lack of anti-lynching legislation until 2005, but senators are currently pushing for an anti-lynching bill.  

U.S. Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) rolled out the bill, called the “Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018,” this week. 

“Lynching is a dark, despicable part of our history, and we must acknowledge that, lest we repeat it,” Harris said in a press release. “From 1882 to 1986 there have been 200 attempts that have failed to get Congress to pass federal anti-lynching legislation, it’s time for that to change.”

Jim Loewen, author of “Sundown Towns,” a book about American towns that refused to allow African-Americans to live in their communities, said African-Americans migrated to high-populated urban areas after the start of the lynching era.

Detroit and Cleveland, Ohio, saw a 42.5 percent and 36.8 percent increase in African-American population between 1910 and 1970, respectively, according to the lynching report. Jacksonville, Florida, saw a decrease of 28.5 percent.

This caused the competition for jobs to increase between the recently migrated African-Americans and the local white people, Loewen said. This angered some white Northerners, creating racial bias nearly as bad as some areas in the South.

“This wasn’t, and isn’t, just a Southern problem,” Loewen said.

Lynchings made their way to the North after the migration of African-Americans to urban cities, according to the report. A total of 89 lynchings were reported in Indiana, Illinois and Ohio during the lynching era.

Hate crimes against African-Americans are still occurring across the country, but they are most prominent in the Southern states and densely populated urban areas, according to the 2016 FBI hate crime statistics.

The number of reported lynchings decreased in the 1940s, and lynchings that did occur were less public and more private due to a more progressive society, according to the lynching report.

So that lynchings won’t be forgotten, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery in April. The memorial has signs, sculptures and art from the lynching era.

Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative,  said the memorial was created to educate people on America’s ugly past.

“Our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow across the American landscape,” Stevenson said. “This shadow cannot be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation, traumatized people of color and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice.”

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The report also suggests that “law enforcement agencies hold public meetings about hate crimes and orientations with specific targeted communities, such as Muslims and immigrants.”

Although reported hate crimes have increased by more than 20 percent from 2014 to 2016 in California, law enforcement “has not been doing enough to identify, report, and respond to these crimes,” according to the report.

At least one California sheriff’s department says it is addressing the problem in a big way.

To bolster victim outreach, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is emphasizing to the immigrant communities that it isn’t concerned with their immigration status, and that officers will aid victims with validating their citizenship, said Detective Christopher Keeling, the hate crime coordinator for the sheriff’s department.

“The fact that you’re a victim and you’re assisting with the investigation … we will help you stay here,” Keeling said deputies tell immigrants who report hate crimes. “We will help you with your VISA because we want you here because you’re not the type of person that we think should be moving.”

State law prohibits law enforcement from detaining, reporting or turning over hate crime victims and witnesses to federal immigration authorities “as long as such individuals are not charged with or convicted of certain crimes under state law,” according to the Auditor’s report.

Keeling said there was a 19 percent drop in reported hate crimes in his 4,000 square mile jurisdiction from 2016 to 2017. There were 166 hate crimes reported in 2017 and 206 in 2016, according to an LASD document obtained by News21.

He traces the drop in the county’s hate crimes, in part, to underreporting.

Undocumented immigrants, more so than other victim groups, are increasingly deterred from working with law enforcement because they fear deportation, undermining the county’s hate crime data accuracy, Keeling said.

“We can’t protect what we don’t know,” Keeling said.

Keeling said one of his department’s goals is to prevent undocumented immigrants from becoming hate incident victims twice – once for the crime and twice for a system that fails to report and protect.

New pamphlets that explain what hate crimes are, the rights every victim has and why he or she shouldn’t be afraid to report, regardless of immigration status, have been designed, Keeling said. Once printed, all LASD sheriff’s stations will have them and deputies will hand them out in the community, he added.

“Immigration status is NOT a determining factor for assistance,” states an excerpt in the pamphlet obtained by News21.

The pamphlet contains California’s hate crime statute and explains the difference between hate crimes and hate incidents. It also emphasizes that both types of situations must be reported to law enforcement.

“Hate crimes and hate incidents MUST be reported in order to ensure proper documentation, investigation and prosecution,” an excerpt of the pamphlet states. “Not reporting these incidents to law enforcement only encourages perpetrators to continue to act on their beliefs and they will continue to pose a threat to our communities.”

But Keeling said the pamphlets alone won’t properly bolster hate crime reporting in undocumented communities stricken with fear; it takes one-on-one attention, constant outreach, and eventually a level of trust that produces more accurate numbers.

“They have to first see us an equal, as a friend, as a partner,” he said. “And that takes time. I get it.”

But advocates say more needs to be done to improve relations between officers and immigrants who are victims of hate crimes.

“We have women that come to our office that are literally are afraid – even with asylum – that (citizenship) can be taken away from them,” said Maria Roman, a transgender woman who is a board member of the TransLatin@ Coalition, a nonprofit which does advocacy work for trans Latina immigrants.

“I think that there’s a lot of work to be done,” she said.

The post <b>LA</b> sheriffs look for ways to build trust with immigrants, boost accurate reporting
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