Jim Hacking tells a story about a small Shia Muslim mosque in St. Louis not far from Macklind Avenue, which, to use his words, is nondescript in almost every way. “It looks like a storefront, and there are no outward signs that distinguish it as a mosque,” he says.

But that hasn’t stopped it from being vandalized over the last few years.

“It’s really sad,” says Hacking, an attorney in St. Louis who is also the chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Muslim Rights Task Force. “Obviously these people came here because they were an oppressed minority in Iraq. They are the ones who should benefit from religious freedom in America. Then to come here and have someone do this – it’s truly a shame.”

What’s also a shame and frustrating, says Hacking and others who represent immigrant and minority groups, is that when they hear about cases of violence or vandalism that seem to be fueled by hate, often the victims won’t come forward to police. And these cases aren’t only confined to immigrants and minorities living in urban areas – officials and student leaders at college campuses say there seems to be an uptick in bias-motivated incidents, many of which go unreported.

Jim Buford, president of the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, said crimes committed against black residents often go unreported because the victims don’t want to talk about the incidents.

Jorge Riopedre, president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis, said he’s often stymied in his efforts to kick-start a criminal investigation because Hispanic victims are unwilling to report key pieces of information.

“This happens with documented citizens, so you can only imagine the trouble getting undocumented citizens to speak up,” Riopedre said.

The same is often true for immigrant groups like African refugees, according to Gedlu Metaferia, executive director of the African Mutual Assistance Association of Missouri.

“Immigrants face harassment and have racial epithets directed toward them, but they don’t come forward,” Metaferia said. “I say, ‘Go report it. You can’t sit here pretending everything is well.’ But they are silent. It really pains me.”

Minorities often the target

of hate crimes

About half of the 7,783 hate crime cases reported in 2008, the last year for which data is available, involved racially motivated crimes, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data. Of the incidents in this category, nearly three-fourths were motivated by anti-black bias. Sixty-one percent of offenders overall were white, and roughly 20 percent were black.

The other half of cases involved crimes that were deemed motivated by bias against people based on their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity or disability. Of the offenses committed because of the victims’ perceived ethnicity or national origin, 64 percent were due to anti-Hispanic bias, the FBI report shows. That’s a marked increase from 2004, when the figure was 50 percent.

In the 2008 FBI report, 32 Missouri agencies submitted 99 incidents of hate crimes. The number was down from 2007 but up from 2006 and 2005. Of the hate crimes reported in 2008, 70 were deemed racially motivated, 14 based on sexual orientation, nine on religion and six on ethnicity. In St. Louis, 11 of the 13 reported cases were racially motivated. The St. Louis County Police Department’s only reported case involved ethnicity.

Through the Missouri Uniform Crime Reporting program, law enforcement agencies share data. A spreadsheet from the Missouri Highway Patrol shows roughly 175 victims reported hate crimes in 2008, and 140 victims in 2009. That’s not a count of the number of incidents because multiple victims can be associated with the same incident. Blacks were the most likely group to be victimized, with Hispanics far down on the list, according to the reported data.

Buford said hate crimes against black residents have long been on his radar and continue to be a problem.

“We see cases all the time – graffiti, racial epithets painted on churches,” he said. “These are incidents where people weren’t personally attacked but institutions were attacked.”

He said a combination of factors, among them a struggling economy and the ascendancy of black politicians such as President Barack Obama, helps explain what he sees as increasing hostility toward minorities.

While blacks are still more often victims of hate crimes than Hispanics, a 2009 report, “Confronting the New Faces of Hate: Hate Crimes in America,” from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, mentioned the rise in hate crimes committed against Hispanics and those perceived to be immigrants as being “of particular concern.” The report says the spike in violence is likely due to controversy over illegal immigration.

Riopedre agrees. “Missouri, compared to many other states, has a relatively small (Hispanic) immigrant population, so people aren’t often exposed (to Hispanic residents). Anti-immigrant legislation sends a message. You have immigrant populations that feel unwanted, and unscrupulous people feel like they are on a mission and are sanctioned to act on their hate.”

Gilberto Pinela, a local television talk-show host who deals regularly with issues affecting area Hispanics, said stereotypes lead to a culture of intolerance.

“There’s a lot of misinformation and ignorance out there – some people tend to assume that all Hispanics here are illegal day laborers,” he said. “With the economy as it is you hear more people being confrontational about Hispanics taking away their jobs and not paying taxes.”

Pinela is bolstered by a recent New York Times article that reported that the majority of working immigrants in the St. Louis metropolitan area were found to hold “higher-paying white-collar jobs – as professionals, technicians, or administrators – rather than lower-paying blue-collar and service jobs.”

Karen Aroesty, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of Missouri and Southern Illinois, said she agrees that the immigration debate has “kicked off enormous bias against immigrants and those who are perceived as undocumented.”

Most hate incidents she is aware of locally involve anti-Hispanic and anti-gay bias. She said she hears anecdotally about hate crimes directed at Hispanics as being on the rise but is awaiting the FBI data from 2009 (due out in late 2010) to gauge the recent trend.

“Money says that the number of incidents against Hispanics goes up, but there are questions of course about the accuracy of those numbers and with the difficulty in keeping truly accurate audits around hate crimes,” said Aroesty, who staffs the work of the U.S. Attorney’s Hate Crimes Task Force for Eastern Missouri and Southern Illinois. The group, which is made up of law enforcement officials, community leaders and elected officials, meet several times a year in St. Louis to discuss bias-motivated violence in the area.

Why hate crimes go unreported

Aroesty said it’s easy to understand why Hispanics don’t come forward – fears about immigration status, not to mention distrust in government and unfamiliarity with the American legal process.

“Frankly, who wants to report if you’re a victim? It’s not just an attack against you but against everyone you represent, and it’s hard for a community to come to grips with that reality,” she said. “Hate-crime victims have to come forward at the right time, but that doesn’t happen very often.”

Jennifer Rafanan, head of the Missouri Immigrant and Refugee Advocates group, agrees that immigrants fear reporting a hate crime will trigger an investigation into a person’s immigration status. For those with documentation, it’s often a fear about how law enforcement officials will respond.

“[The victims] may come from a country where the police aren’t responsive,” Rafanan said. “They might have a fear about public officials treating them poorly.”

That’s also a common fear among African immigrants, according to Metaferia. He said victims of verbal attacks and car vandalism, the majority of whom tend to be women, are hesitant to get police involved in part because they are used to police corruption.

“There’s a feeling that coming forward will only exacerbate the problem,” he said. “They tell me, ‘So if I speak up, someone will come interview me, and what proof do I have? I’ll end up getting in trouble.'”

Edgar Ramirez, pastoral associate for the Hispanic Ministry at St. Cecelia’s, a predominantly Hispanic parish, said he isn’t aware of hate crimes that have gone unreported. He, however, can see why the emotionally charged atmosphere surrounding immigration would have a chilling effect on immigrants coming forth with information about crimes.

Aroesty said she’s noticed that over the past decade, police have become more responsive to hate-crime cases. “Yet the trust in those folks hasn’t grow in communities they serve,” Aroesty said. The challenge is in educating people to speak up.

Trust is an issue for black residents, according to Buford. “It’s a matter of not believing in the system and not trusting that police will do anything about it [when they are made aware of attacks]. There’s also a certain level of embarrassment for the victim. No one wants to be in the news for an attack.”

Buford said one problem is a lingering suspicion that law enforcement doesn’t have time to see through hate-crime cases, which often involve lots of paperwork and judgment calls. He said the larger police departments have long been overtaxed, and police in smaller municipalities often don’t have the resources to look into these complex cases.

Now that federal authorities have more leeway to investigate cases that local agencies don’t pursue, Buford says that blacks are beginning to feel if they report such crimes, the government is better equipped to respond.

Rafanan’s group recently developed a form that it hopes will encourage recent immigrant victims to come forward. It asks them to write down their contact information and describe the incident, but the form promises confidentiality until the person signs off that the information can be shared.

Even if most people don’t agree to go public right away, Rafanan said, “it gives us a better sense of the kind of incidents we’re dealing with.”