The web page of the Colorado Bureau of Investigations’ (CBI) 2007 Hate Crime Report, which is part of its Crime in Colorado Report, did not report Murray’s attacks as hate crimes.
The CBI web site cites the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting definition of a hate crime, which is:
“A criminal offense committed against a person or property which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnicity/national origin, or sexual orientation.”
Lance Clem, Public Information Officer for CBI, spoke with CNA in a phone interview about the state hate crimes report.
Clem told CNA that local agencies reported the shootings as homicides but did not report them as hate crimes, explaining that the data CBI uses comes from local agencies.
“They are voluntarily reported, so there is a good chance that they will be updated later,” he said.
“There are some things about the Crime in Colorado report that are very incomplete,” he explained. “The only reason why it’s of value to anybody is that it shows trends.”
“It’s not complete enough for us to do a comprehensive report on a lot of different elements.”
Clem added that the CBI collects the information on its own initiative, using a part time-employee whose work begins in January and is done “by about May or June.”
“There’s no incentive or disincentive” for local agencies to send data in, he continued. “They either do it, or they don’t.”
Clem confirmed that the CBI hate crimes statistics are used by the FBI in its national hate crime statistics. National statistics would therefore report the killings at the Youth With A Mission center and New Life Church as homicides and not as hate crimes.
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However, he added that it is possible that the crimes were catalogued as hate crimes in local agencies’ databases but the information was never sent on to the CBI.
“It’s very, very common for those numbers to have big discrepancies,” he said of crime statistics.
“It’s really up to local law enforcement. Sometimes they’ll just report it as a median case and leave it at that, which doesn’t fully represent what’s going on.
“Local agencies will tell you that hate crimes are kind of difficult to prove, because you have to establish a real motive.
“There is some difficulty at the local level making that decision. Every chief and sheriff I know takes it very seriously, but they are difficult cases to prove,” Clem told CNA.
He added that if an agency did incorrectly report an incident, it would need to re-submit the correct incident report.