LIMA — Law enforcement agencies in St. Marys, Ohio City, Glandorf, Fort Jennings and Continental did not report any hate crime statistics from 2009 to 2014.
Additionally, 11 other agencies, including the Lima Police Department and Allen County Sheriff’s Office, had mixed results, with some years missing.
Does that mean we’re all living in peace and harmony?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Hate crimes are defined by the FBI as crimes based solely on a person’s ethnicity, religion, disability or sexual orientation. The annual U.S. hate crime statistics are part of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system, a tabulation of various crime data gathered voluntarily from law enforcement agencies across the country.
However, a recent analysis by The Associated Press found that almost 2,800 local agencies did not submit any hate crime statistics between 2009 and 2014. In Ohio, 136 agencies, about 16 percent of the state total, did not report these statistics. In addition, thousands more only reported those statistics during some of those years.
Lima Police Department Maj. Pat Coon said these gaps were due to FBI reporting requirements, which have changed through the years.
“Up until 2005, they did a form every year where they had to mark on it that there wasn’t any,” he said. “Then they went to, from my understanding, a policy where if you didn’t have any hate crimes, you didn’t send anything in. Now what they do is use a computerized workbook that they log into, and they put in all the information and check a checkbox in that, and it automatically gets submitted.”
The study found that the Lima Police Department did not report any hate crimes from 2009 to 2012, and Coon said there were no hate crimes in 2013, with one reported in 2014. The Allen County Sheriff’s Office did not report from 2009 to 2011.
Local chapters of the NAACP and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy group PFLAG said they have not heard reports directly of hate crimes being committed against minorities or the homosexual community, but there were still concerns about undertones of intolerance in the area that could easily rise up into hate crimes.
“We receive, as an organization, hate mail quite often, and we have also received phone calls from numbers we could not trace with very hateful things being communicated,” said the Rev. Ronald Fails, local NAACP chapter president. “‘You need to take yourself, your organization and everyone connected with you back to Africa.’”
“I know that school issues have been an ongoing issue,” PFLAG chapter President Kim Butler said. “We hear more from parents when kids are coming out that they’re so scared and fearful.”
Coon emphasized, however, that his department is committed to fostering positive relationships with everyone in the community, as evidenced by programs such as community-based policing.
“Anything we can do to outreach to anyone in the city of Lima is an improvement to the whole community,” he said.
