 |
|
State and local law enforcement are often ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to extremist crimes in ways that generate leads and investigations. (Nor does DOJ evaluate whether hate-crime perpetrators are part of a larger domestic extremist group when it defers an investigation to local law enforcement. And in 2019, the FBI said 80% of its counterterrorism agents in the field were assigned to international terrorism cases, while just 20% worked on domestic ones.)
Even when local officials flag a possible far-right plot, the feds rarely make the case. In 2019, Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, released a study showing that hate-crime cases were referred to federal authorities for prosecution almost 2,000 times over the past decade. Only 15% of those referrals led to prosecutions.
|
|
|
|
