Ten O'Clock News; Hate crimes seminar

No. As a pledge we got a couple Niger they call them hate crime most incidents of racial violence that are all too common. Boston had 452 of them in the past four years though they're rarely recognized for what they are. Move back and look through these 450 racial incidents, and say "How did the original officer categorize these?" And this is in Boston, arguably the best trained department in civil rights in the state. 19 of those 452 were originally categorized as racial incidents. Teaching police to recognize these crimes is one goal of this study. Teaching all of us to recognize their severity is another. That these crimes are more serious, than you would normally believe, and more serious than any official statistics would say. To understand just how serious these incidents are, consider this, fully one half of them involve assaults and 30 percent of those assaults are serious enough to require hospitalization. That's the Boston number and it's bad

news because nationally only 7 percent of all assaults are so severe. Generally these are multiple offenders attacking a single victim. The average number of offenders was 4 - Attacking a single victim. The single most common reason he found was issues of turf. This city has few areas of common ground. All categories of racial and ethnic groups in the city were attacked with nobody left out. We attacked everybody. According to the study, blacks and whites were equally apt to be victims and usually at the hands of the other race. Of 118 black victims, 92% percent were attacked by whites. And of 111 white victims, 78% attacked by blacks. Those two groups, white and black, accounted for two-thirds of all victims. Only 6% of victims were Hispanic, and all the rest were Asian. Most notably, Vietnamese. Indeed, this group was victimized far out of proportion to their population in the

city. In roughly a quarter of all hate crimes, the offenders are never known. When they are, it breaks down like this. Whites commit the largest number of racially motivated crimes, about two-thirds. Blacks commit another third, Hispanic and Asians together are responsible for very few, at least in this study. The researchers know what they're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. These are the sort of crimes people are reluctant to report. For the 10 o'clock News. I'm Hope Kelly.