KANSAS CITY, Mo. — On the heels of the Neo-Nazi rally staged downtown earlier this month, the U.S. Justice Department announced the formation of a community task force on hate crimes on Tuesday. UMKC will host a hate crime conference in January.
Virtually anyone can be part of this community task force, which seeks to better identify prejudice in neighborhoods and bullying in schools.
The task force mission is reduce the number of hate crimes reported in our region. FBI statistics released Monday show there were 104 reported hate crimes in Missouri last year. A majority of them, 67, happened in the Kansas City metropolitan area.
It’s hoped that through better communication and dialogue the Justice Department can identify why hate crimes are happening and prevent them in the future.
“It goes exactly what our country was founded on,” said Michael Kaste, special agent-in-charge of the Kansas City FBI office. “What our country stands for, that is that everybody is different and has the right to be different.”
Most hate crimes reported are racially motivated, but hate crimes also can be motivated by sexual orientation, religion or ethnicity. White nationalist groups like the Neo-Nazis foster much of the hate, and the FBI says it closely monitors those groups.
U.S. Attorney Tammy Dickinson concedes that hate crimes are more difficult to prosecute, because you have to prove that the crime was motivated by hate. In most other crimes: motive, the why of the crime, doesn’t matter.