This bill would provide assistance to state and local law enforcement agencies and amend federal law to streamline the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes. This bipartisan hate crimes prevention bill must be an important priority of the 107th Congress, Rep. DeGette said.
Hate crimes are especially destructive because they affect entire communities.
This is especially important to the people of the Denver area because our community is the most diverse in the entire Rocky Mountain region. The FBI recently released the 1999 Hate Crimes Statistics Report, showing that the majority of hate crimes committed that year were motivated by racial and ethnic or national origin biases. Sadly, many communities in our country are increasingly the target of hate crimes. There is no more graphic reminder of hate violence than the shocking murders of Oumar Dia who was shot at a downtown Denver bus stop in 1997, James Byrd in Texas, Matthew Shephard in nearby Wyoming, Jes s Plascencia in California, and many others across the country. This legislation would expand current law to permit federal prosecution of violence motivated by bias against the victim s sexual orientation, gender or disability.