Closing a hate-crime loophole

IMAGINE WAKING UP in the morning and seeing an image of hate painted on the front door of the apartment you’ve rented for years. This image is meant to target you and your family. Or imagine that an anti-Semitic group learns that a Jewish family lives nearby. One night the ringleader of the group goes to the home and paints a large swastika on a neighbor’s fence across the street. The following morning, as the parents open the front door and usher their children off to school, they are horrified to discover the image right in front of them. Suddenly—even in their own home—they are overwhelmed with anxiety, terrified for their children’s safety. Over the past year, we have seen more and more of these incidents occurring in our schools, appearing in our neighborhoods and our communities.

You might expect, and certainly those parents would expect, that the perpetrators of these attacks would be charged with a hate crime. Unfortunately, in Massachusetts, you’d be wrong. Why? Because the door and the fence don’t belong to the families that were targeted.

Right now, when a person damages or defaces property in order to intimidate a victim based on the victim’s race, religion, sexual orientation, or other protected status, that person can only be prosecuted for a hate crime if the property belongs to the victim. This means that victims who rent apartments, live in our college dorms, or are targeted at work are not protected by our current laws. When a perpetrator evades accountability through this loophole, victims feel vulnerable and exposed, and the perpetrator feels emboldened.

Although a perpetrator may be charged with destruction of property, this does not reflect what actually happened and, even if restitution is ordered, the owner is not obligated to remove the damage.

Read more: https://commonwealthmagazine.org/courts/closing-a-hate-crime-loophole/