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Scholar urges centralized hate‑crime units, better referral rules to improve investigations
Summary
Dr. Janine Bell told the California Commission on the State of Hate that centralized, specialized police hate‑crime units and predictable referral rules (for example, routing any incident with slurs to specialists) produce better investigations and greater victim trust, while most U.S. agencies still fail to report bias data to the FBI.
Dr. Janine Bell, Curt and Linda Roden Professor of Law and Social Justice at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, told the commission on March 26 that specialized, centralized police units are the most effective institutional response for identifying and prosecuting hate crimes. Bell described five‑plus months of embedded fieldwork in a large city hate‑crime unit, interviews with detectives and prosecutors, and a review of roughly 700 case files.
Bell said the unit she studied had language interpreters, victim‑advocate relationships and a case‑classification practice that allowed detectives to separate hate crimes from hate incidents and hate…
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