WA police get one hour of hate-crime training despite rising cases

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.”