Janine Jackson: There are pundits who still say we should wait and see what a Trump White House will do before expressing concerns. But that ignores how Trump’s media-assisted prominence, the mainstreaming of his brand of brazen hatred, has encouraged and emboldened racist, sexist xenophobes around the country already. Donald Trump didn’t invent hate crime, but he has put the relationship between legitimizing talk and violent action on a plate for media. So how will a press corps that still talks about “race relations” when they mean white supremacy deal with the particular brew now concocted?

We’re joined now by reporter A.C. Thompson, co-author of the book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights; he works now at ProPublica, joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome back to CounterSpin, A.C. Thompson.

A.C. Thompson: Thanks for having me on.

JJ: We hear, of course, anecdotally or through social media, about individual hate crimes, people who are targeted for harassment or for violence because of their perceived ethnicity or religion or gender. I think people might be a little surprised to learn that the official data collection on the problem is really not very good, is it?

ACT: It’s abysmal. What’s going on is that there’s federal law that’s been in place since about 1990 that says, hey, FBI, you have to go out to state and local cops and ask them what’s going on with hate crimes in their jurisdictions. The problem is, those local and state authorities are not compelled to compile decent statistics and give them to the FBI. So a lot of departments just don’t participate; about 20 percent across the country don’t participate at all.

And then the others that do participate, I think a lot of them are lackadaisical. So in some of these states where we know there’s a significant number of hate crimes, you’re getting reports of two, three, five hate crimes a year, and people that follow this know that’s simply not true.

JJ: We saw James Comey come out and apologize for the lack of data. He seems to do that a lot. He was apologizing that the FBI didn’t have good numbers on law enforcement’s killing of black people, and he’s saying on this, too, yeah, we don’t really have so much to go on. Is it your sense that there is a lack of motivation, perhaps, to collect these things, or is it really just that it’s more work to do?

JCT: You know, there’s several things going on here. One is that, at the local level, a lot of local law enforcement officials don’t necessarily know what they’re dealing with, even today, when they get a hate crime in their jurisdiction. So if you have a verbal assault that involves a racial epithet, that may be get written up and reported simply as a verbal assault, and not as a hate crime, in lots of different places. So that’s one problem, is sort of training and the actual police work on the ground.

The next problem is that there are no penalties for law enforcement agencies that don’t submit accurate data to the FBI, and the FBI has not pushed them to submit accurate data. They have not been particularly forceful about getting decent data, on a lot of fronts, from state and local law enforcement. And so it just hasn’t happened.

There has been legislation that was introduced last congressional session saying, hey, this has got to change; federal funding is going to be tied to departments accurately reporting hate crime information. And that legislation didn’t go anywhere. So it will be interesting to see if this comes up again in the next congressional session.

JJ: Of course, data by itself is not reporting. You have to talk to people or, more importantly, listen to people. What is the project that ProPublica is involved with? What are the goals of what you’re trying to do around collecting this information?

ACT: What we’re doing is we’re building a big coalition that involves civil rights groups, ethnic media, journalism students and mainstream journalism outlets. And basically what we’re trying to do is create a complementary data set to the FBI’s data. What we’re looking for are both things that would be defined under state laws or federal law as a hate crime, but also acts of intimidation and harassment that don’t rise to that level. A lot of things that we’re seeing on social media and Twitter, for example. And we are building this team to really try to understand, document and react positively to this moment, where we have a very direct linkage between political speech and crimes on the ground.

JJ: You were talking about police departments not knowing, maybe, the definition, or not categorizing things as hate crimes, and I think the same thing can go for journalists. You know, motives are always going to be murky. Somebody is always going to have a friend who says they don’t have a racist bone in their body. I’m not trying to minimize the difficulty of getting ahold of this issue, of talking about it. But of course we have to talk about it. I mean, we have to.

ACT: Absolutely. I think what’s unique about this moment in modern American history is that you have some very clear signs that what is happening, a lot of it relates very directly to the presidential election. So when you see graffiti that is a spin on the Trump campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” that says “Make America White Again,” and there’s a big huge swastika, well, we know that this is a hate crime related to politics, to the current president-elect. When we see swastikas and the word “Trump” at a park in Brooklyn, we know what that’s about. And a lot of the crimes that have occurred since the election, that have been documented by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, have quite clearly been connected to the political moment.

JJ: You just mentioned Southern Poverty Law Center. When I was speaking with Heidi Beirich from that group, she told me that journalists tell her that they don’t want to report on white supremacy or on racist acts because they have a sense that exposing it is legitimizing or almost glamorizing it. That seems like an unwinning strategy. But I think it’s partly because some journalists have kind of painted themselves into this corner of objectivity, where they can’t say things are bad or wrong, and I think it leads to a kind of undercoverage.

I wonder, what are you looking for from journalists on this? Obviously they use the data, but what would you like to see reporters doing? You’re a reporter who doesn’t just count numbers, but actually goes out and talks to people. What sort of journalism do you think would be helpful in this moment?

ACT: My belief is different than the people who say, oh, you know, we can’t cover this because it’s sort of legitimizing these kooks and giving them the attention they [don’t] deserve. I think we have to report on every one of these incidents that we can verify, and that we can get out there and interview people about. I think that’s crucial. And I think what we need to do is do this journalism that in part is simply witnessing a very, very scary time in our lives, and giving voice to the people who feel terrified.

There are people in my community who feel terrified. We’ve had two very significant hate crimes in my community where I live. And those people, my neighbors, they need to be able to speak and say, hey, this is incredibly scary to us, it’s tragic, it’s very, very upsetting, and we need somebody to listen to us.

And I think the goal of journalism in this moment is to generate some sort of reaction, whether that’s a popular reaction that says, hey, we are not going to tolerate racism, ethnic hatred and the rest in our community, or whether that’s an official reaction that says, hey, we are going to take every one of these crimes absolutely seriously, and we’re going to put people away if they are attacking one another based on religious beliefs, or based on their race or ethnicity or gender orientation. I think the goal of journalism at this time is to provoke some sort of meaningful response from the public and from officialdom that says, this is not something that will be tolerated.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with A.C. Thompson, reporter at ProPublica. Find them online at ProPublica.org. A.C. Thompson, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ACT: Thanks a lot for having me on.

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