I report on hate crimes for pro-publica. You can think of a hate crime as a crime committed against somebody because of who they are. Congress forced the Department of Justice to collect information on hate crimes starting in 1990. One of the greatest obligations of this administration and of the Department of Justice is the guarantee of civil rights for all Americans. Hate crimes cannot be tolerated in a free society. But many police departments don't actually report their hate crimes to the FBI, assuming they have been marked and down at all. We called every state agency charged with setting police academy training standards and we asked if they provide training on hate crimes. And we sent more than 350 public records requests to law enforcement agencies across the country to see how they track hate crimes. From talking to experts, we knew that hate crime reporting was spotty at best, but the results of our investigation were surprising even to me. Of the more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies that report hate crimes to the FBI, 88% of those just simply say they have none. Law enforcement agencies and seven of the 20 largest cities in the United States either severely under report or don't report hate crimes at all. In the South, hate crimes are rarely reported. So, why is law enforcement failing to report hate crimes? Well, part of it is that officers get little to no training. What we found is that only 12 states have statutes that require police academies to train on hate crimes. Another problem? Just not doing it. Like at the Miami-Dade County Police Department, where officers said they just didn't fill out hate crime report forms. And a third problem, officials confuse state laws with federal laws. Like in Alabama, where the state hate crime law doesn't cover homosexuality. And police officers there told us they wouldn't mark down a crime with anti-gay bias as a hate crime. This is in spite of the fact that the federal law asked them to. The problem is that people are being attacked. They're being attacked for who they are. And our law enforcement agencies by and large don't appear to understand how to handle these crimes. The FBI is required to track this information for the rest of the country, but they can't do it without support from local law enforcement agencies.