Police departments nationwide regularly receive a document from the DOJ entitled “Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines And Training Manual.” The point of the manual is to educate officers on how to identify hate crimes and report them to the feds for the all-important hate crime statistics you often see in the media. They were everywhere during the Trump presidency. You still see these hate crime figures cited today, in fact. These are the statistics that supposedly prove white supremacy is the greatest threat this country has ever faced.
Given all the reliance on these numbers, it’s strange that no one ever talks about the DOJ manual. You’d think there’d be some curiosity about how these numbers are determined. So I decided to read the document myself. One of the most extensive sections of the manual, as it turns out, is the “exercises” section. These are hypothetical scenarios that the DOJ provides to police departments to help illustrate hate crimes law. One of the exercises is about two gang members who assault a random Hindu person with a baseball bat. The exercise states that, “When taken into custody, the two juveniles reported they committed the assault because they want the Hindu people to go back where they came from.”
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