Professor Brian Levin is the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. After leaving at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) , where he worked as Associate Director for the KlanWatch Project/Militia Task Force, now called the Intelligence Project, he founded the Center at the college where he first began to teach. He brought the Center with him when he moved to Cal State in 1999. It has been running consistently for the last 13 years.

The Center’s work is strictly non-partisan. It is against censorship, for free speech, and is opposed to any persons, organizations or entities that try to undermine democratic institutions and pluralistic democracies. It opposes those who use extrajudicial violence and those who promote it, as well as those who actively promote bigotry. Here, Levin is quick to point out that one has to leave a little wiggle room for reasonable people to disagree. “We try not to get involved in the day-to-day debates of issues that are in the public discourse.” Abortion and immigration laws are examples of this. “That kind of thing we don’t want to get involved in because the mechanisms of a pluralistic democracy are already addressing them. However, to the extent that a bigot would use Arabaphobic or Islamaphobic stereotypes or miscategorize Islam, then they come into my area. I don’t think these people should be censored. I’m saying they should be exposed.” What Levin seeks to do is to set the factual record straight. “Free speech is great, but what I try to do is use my research to expose hardened bigots and what I can tell you is no group has a monopoly on bigots.” He also offers his services to testify before state legislatures, do research and prepare Supreme Court amicus briefs.

How did you become interested in this kind of work?
It preceded my study of law. I was an undergraduate history major and one of my professors said, “You should take this class with Judge Higginbotham.” At the time he was teaching this class on race and the law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. U Penn had this innovative thing, now matter where you were studying, you could take a class in any other division of the university. So, as an undergraduate, I took his graduate law class. My project there, which became a grant, was studying racial violence crimes. Judge Higginbotham was a heavy influence on me because he grew up at a time when there was still segregation. He went to a segregated college and was only one of three African Americans at Yale Law School in the early 50s. He really had a tremendous influence on me.

You found that there was a spike in hate crime around the time of the election. How did that come about?
I found out because I do pretty much daily searches. We monitor this stuff through a variety of avenues, some of which include mainstream media, LexisNexis searches, obviously, our own contacts in the anti-hate world, as well as official data from government sources. The problem with official data is that it often lags. But what I can tell you is that I was getting so many reports in—scores of them—that I was like, wow. This is a big deal and it was spread across the whole country. So this information was anecdotal, but I’m a data person, so I want to be careful. Data is important. I cannot say officially, that there was a spike. What I can say, is where I was seeing a certain number of hate crimes in a week or month, I was getting a lot more in the pre-election months, leading up to the election, and then shortly thereafter. Also, the frequency of postings and the real vitriol in the postings on the spoke sites (hate sites) that I’m on were significantly higher. The postings there were really out of hand. Although I must say, a lot of white supremacists were scared that something would happen and then the hammer of the government would come down on them. So there was some interesting counseling going on: “If you have something to say, keep it clean here.”

Is this apparent increase continuing?
I haven’t seen anything to suggest that it will be sustained. We saw a similar thing after Clinton outlined his policy about gays in the military, in 1993. The thing here is you had a certain inflection point, in other words, the election and the inauguration. What’s very interesting about these kinds of things is you’ll often see a precipitous rise and then a decline that might not be quite as precipitous, but over time peters out a bit until something else lights it back up. So I don’t think it’s been sustained. But who knows? These things can be like wildfires. They can flame up and flame out and then go out quickly before reigniting again. You often have a catalyst for these incidents that causes a precipitous rise. The Rodney King beating was one, the Gulf War, 9/11, etc. So what tends to happen is you have this short, relatively unsustained increase, which then goes down somewhat afterward. That’s where I think we are now, but let’s see what the next triggered catalyst will be.

What would you consider one of the most underreported stories?
I’m very interested in violence against the homeless as a hate crime, which is pretty controversial. No state, other than Maine, includes the homeless. And Maine has a really watered down version of a law, which says that a judge could take it into account if they so choose. Outside that, there is no state that has a hate crime law on the books that has homelessness in it. We have endeavored with the National Coalition for the Homeless to get a federal law introduced and to get legislation introduced in about ten states. But in no other state has it actually been enacted. And this is what I think is really interesting: although the data has some limitations, if you look at what’s been collected by the National Coalition for the Homeless and data that I’ve gone through, compare it to the homicides that took place with regard to all traditional hate crimes (race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and disability,) there have been more homeless folks murdered by domiciled people where there was no other apparent motive, than all the other hate homicides combined over the last ten years.

Do they know the perpetrators are domiciled people?
Yes, yeah. Now there might be a couple of instances where we recategorize them, but what I’m saying is it’s double, it’s double the number. I think it’s astounding. And getting anyone to cover this has been like pulling teeth. If you had as many Jews or Muslims, god forbid, or African Americans murdered in one year, you would have Congressional hearings, but with the homeless, it’s like, eh, whatever. I’m leaving out crimes like drug deals gone bad, personal animus, regular street crime where someone is trying to attack someone to get money or a piece of property. This is merely people going out just to attack someone who they have a bias against. And the thing is, where it used to be people could go after African Americans or Jews, then for a while other folks, one of the last folks it is still socially acceptable to go after are homeless folks and also undocumented folks.

Have there been any significant changes in hate crimes in the United States?
I think hate crime reporting has really unraveled in many states and I’ve had an incredibly difficult time getting that message out. For instance, Mississippi (MS) reported 0 hate crimes in 2007. Mississippi has the highest percentage of African Americans in the United States. African Americans are the number one targeted group for hate crime in the US, yet MS reported 0 hate crimes. African Americans are somewhat more represented as offenders, as well. So what I’m saying is when you have a state with a large proportion of the group that is the most attacked, and they reported 0 hate crimes, that tells you something. Louisiana reported numbers in the teens. Arkansas, is similar but not much better. And Georgia reported something like 16. So when you have states with large African American populations that are not reporting, that skews the data. Additionally, there were states that in the past were reporting far more, like Pennsylvania (PA), Florida (FL) and Illinois (IL). Their numbers have broken down as well.

So when the FBI report comes out and shows that hate crimes have been relatively stable, what they’re not getting is that many states appear to have numbers that are not representative. If you look at the states that have the highest African American percentages, many of them report next to nothing with regard to hate crimes. And then when you look at states that, in the past, supplied a decent number in the national count, states like PA, FL and IL, those numbers have gone down by more than half what they used to be. That’s a great story.

Why do you think this is happening?
I think it’s because police departments in those states are not doing their jobs. There has been a diminution in training. At my Center, one of the things we’ve been doing over the last five years or so is actually training people— police, district attorneys and others in the field—over the Internet, in cooperation with the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and Southern Poverty Law Center. We train people on the subject of hate crime as far away as New Zealand and throughout America and Canada. One of the things you can tell is that agencies that don’t participate in the program at all will just fill out a sheet that says they had 0 hate crimes. It’s not mandatory. There has also been a shift toward counter-terrorism. I don’t think hate crimes have been as big a concern.

What action do you think is needed?
The need is for states and the federal government to get better hate crime laws. I would like to see states that don’t cover such groups as gays, lesbians, homeless and undocumented people, and gender as well, to reform their hate crime laws. By the same token, I have every confidence that President Obama will sign a national hate crime law that closes the loopholes in the laws that are on the books. I’ve been working on that since 1987. I think it’s important to close these loopholes because as the law is now, if you attack someone who is black, that’s not enough. You have to hook it into some kind of protected activity such as using a hotel or serving on a jury or seeking public education. It’s about time we got rid of that extra requirement.

Past Close Up Articles

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Anene Ejikeme Assistant Professor, Trinity University
Alexander Verkhovsky, Director, SOVA Center for Information and Analysis (Moscow)
Innokenty Grekov, Human Rights First
Paul St. Clair, Executive Director, Roma Community Centre
Rev. Allan Ramirez, Latino Advocate
Dr. Agapito López, M.D.
Bill Habern, defense attorney
Anya Cordell, activist
Rais Bhuiyan, survivor
Allison Moore, Volunteer