WA police get one hour of hate-crime training despite rising cases
Experts say that without sufficient education about modern best practices, some officers may not even recognize incidents as bias-related.
/ October 28, 2024
When antisemitic graffiti appeared on the Western Washington University campus last November, student Maddie Pelkey took her concerns directly to the campus police chief.
“I became much more aware of me being Jewish when I saw antisemitism spiking across campuses,” Pelkey said. “I felt more and more unsafe on my campus.”
University police documented the incident, but did not have cameras in the area or a suspect, according to a police report. Now graduated, Pelkey said it seemed at the time officers had little they could do.
“As time goes on,” she said, “I guess sometimes it feels like an aspect the administration is kind of tired of hearing about it.”
Training records show the state’s Criminal Justice Training Commission requires just one hour of hate-crime-specific training as part of the 720-hour basic law enforcement academy that every officer must complete for certification.
Public record requests to the state’s six public universities found their campus police departments did not require additional training, even as antisemitic harassment, anti-Asian violence and other acts of discrimination have increased in recent years.
Experts argue more in-depth training could help officers better identify bias-motivated crimes and work more effectively with marginalized communities.
Det. Elizabeth Wareing, the bias crimes coordinator at the Seattle Police Department, serves as an instructor for the CJTC and leads police academy trainees through the one-hour course on “Hate Crimes-Investigating Bias-related Incidents.”
“It’s not enough time, I will tell you that,” Wareing said. “It’s the time I have. But I would love to have 90 minutes or two hours to really kind of speak more slowly and give them the opportunity to digest the information and ask more questions.”
Rising hate crimes
The Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, which collects crime data from departments around the state, reported 576 hate-motivated incidents in 2023, a 5.5% increase over the previous year. The report found the number of victims of such crimes increased by 12.6% to 776 individuals.
WASPC declined to comment on the level of training police officers receive regarding hate crime offenses.
The 2023 annual report listed 174 incidents involving anti-Black bias, 83 involving anti-Hispanic or Latino bias, and 49 involving anti-Asian bias. The report found 231 bias incidents tied to sexual orientation, 71 involving gender identity, and 12 against people with disabilities.
The report also listed 111 religion-motivated incidents in 2023, of which 59 involved anti-Jewish bias. The Anti-Defamation League had reported a record 65 incidents of antisemitism across Washington in 2022.
State law identifies hate crimes as criminal offenses based on the perception of a victim’s race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or other characteristics, and creates a reasonable fear that a threat to a person is likely.
“When [people] think of a hate crime, oftentimes they see a burning cross in their mind or they see a swastika, or things that we generally associate with a hate crime or pre-planned sorts of crimes,” Wareing said. “One of the things I talk about is that hate incidents are often opportunistic and not pre-planned.”
Police officers have been required to undergo training on such crimes since 1993. A curriculum manager at the Criminal Justice Training Commission said officers are not required to complete additional hate-crime training after leaving the academy, but departments can impose their own training standards.
“At CJTC, that is kind of a one-shot, new officers going through the academy crash course,” Wareing said, noting any additional training can vary widely from department to department.
Seattle police officers typically undergo an additional 30-minute, self-paced online training on bias crimes every two to three years, she said. A public records request found those training materials cover applicable state laws, city ordinances and relevant department policies.
In 2020, the state Office of the Attorney General released an advisory report recommending police departments adopt periodic training as part of their standard in-service requirements. At the time, the Seattle Police Department had the state’s only dedicated detective for bias-motivated crimes.
Greg Miraglia, a criminology professor and board member of the Matthew Shepard Foundation, said officers may not recognize an offense as a hate crime without sufficient training on modern best practices.
“It does a disservice to the victim and the victim’s community when we don’t call out those crimes and prosecute them at the highest level that they’re capable of being prosecuted at,” he said.
The Matthew Shepard Foundation, founded after Shepard’s hate-motivated murder in 1998, offers LGBT awareness and hate-crime training resources for law enforcement, including an eight-hour course on hate-crime indicators and interacting with victims.
Miri Cypers, regional director for the Anti-Defamation League’s Pacific Northwest Office, said officers would benefit from ongoing training once they have left the academy and learned more about working in the communities they serve.
“One of the challenges we’ve found,” she said, “is that often there’s not a lot of reinforcement or deeper training once folks are actually on the job and have a little bit more experience and context for what policing looks like.”
Campus tensions
Amid a swell in public outcry over the Israel-Hamas war earlier this year, student protest encampments took place at dozens of universities across the country. The University of Washington, Western Washington University, and Evergreen State College all saw multiday demonstrations, drawing tense debate and allegations of antisemitic rhetoric.
Public records requests and interviews with university police officials determined that none of the state’s public universities require officers to take additional hate-crime training after the academy. Universities list reported hate crimes in their annual safety reports for the previous three years every October as part of Clery reporting requirements.
WWU’s 2024 fire safety report listed two hate crimes reported on the Bellingham campus between 2021 and 2023. The university established a bias response team in 2020 to collect data on bias incidents. As of September 2024, administrators haven’t released a report since 2023. Bias Response Team chair Michael Sledge declined to provide a timeline of when an updated report would be released.
The 2024 Washington State University annual fire safety report found 15 hate crimes reported on the Pullman campus between 2021 and 2023.
The UW Seattle campus reported 24 hate crimes between 2021 and 2023 in its latest safety report. Neither UW nor Evergreen had adopted hate-crime policies at their campus police departments. The other four public universities did have policies.
Shaughna Vaughan, the training manager for the UW Police Department, said the department is working to create a policy. But she did not provide a timeline to formally adopt a hate-crime policy or the requirement of any additional training.
(UW also recently released a “campus climate” report that found students had experienced increased concern or fear of antisemitism or Islamophobia during the 2023-2024 academic year.)
Wareing, with the Seattle Police Department, said adopting a hate-crime policy is considered a best practice to provide consistent guidance for tracking and responding to such crimes. Seattle’s policy outlines definitions, protocols and officer responsibilities.
“It’s helpful for people to understand what police involvement can look [like] and what best practices look like,” she said. “It’s so important to handle these well. These are life-altering events, like any violent crime, experiencing that is a life-altering event. So knowledge is powerful.”