The story after a while becomes awfully familiar: Someone in Seattle is assaulted because of who they are – gay, black, Jewish. It bears all the classic signs of a hate crime. Police show up but act as though it's an ordinary crime. When they file a report, it's not designated a hate crime and is neither investigated nor prosecuted as one.

Robert Jamieson, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist, reported last month on just such a case: The incident occurred Aug. 4 in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, when 47-year-old Michael Wrenn of Seattle, along with his friend, Aaron Hudy, were assaulted by a drunken man who asked them if they were gay before punching and kicking them. Moreover, said Wrenn and Hudy, Seattle police treated their concerns dismissively and then failed to designate the assault as a bias crime in their report. Wrote Jamieson:

[G]iven the strong words allegedly used before the attack – "What are you guys, fags?" – the beating looks even worse. Yet on the police report, the box that says "bias crime" was left blank for reasons that are a mystery. Sounds like a bias crime to me.

The incident inspired an Aug. 17 meeting between Seattle police and a trio of City Council members, Tom Rasmussen, Nick Licata, and Sally Clark. Assistant Chief Nick Metz, who oversees the city's bias-crimes unit, reassured the council members that hate crimes were a police priority, promising that officers would be reminded about the need to identify potential bias crimes as such, even when in doubt, so they can be further assessed.

In recent years, there have been a series of incidents similar to that in Belltown in which police handled fairly obvious hate crimes as run-of-the-mill incidents – though police revisited some of these cases after a public outcry, and the outcome was a bias-crime prosecution.

• In April 2006, a black Whitman middle-schooler walking home near a McDonald's in north Ballard was assaulted by three white men who seemingly were provoked only by the victim's race; the men used racial slurs both before in a verbal assault on the youngster and as they beat him. When police arrived on the scene, they first handcuffed the victim. Eventually, two 19-year-old men, Cory Stewart and Colin Kelly, were charged and eventually convicted under the state's malicious-harassment law.
  
• In October 2004, a gay Seattle businessman named Kevin Shaw was found beaten to death in his Porsche. Like many gay-bashing hate crimes, this one was notable for the extraordinary violence the perpetrator visited on his victim and the apparent lack of a motive. When a man named Michael Saga Maiava, who had met Shaw on a chat line, was arrested and charged with the killing, a bias-crime charge was never considered – even though Maiava invoked a "gay panic" defense. The perpetrator's explanation when caught clearly indicated a bias crime. This outraged many in the gay community. As Mario Paduano at Seattlest put it:

Simply put, everything about this case screams gay. Yet you wouldn't know it from the tepid local news coverage. Instead, perhaps out of respect for the dead, perhaps out of respect for the family, perhaps due to cold feet, perhaps out of mere spinelessness, the Seattle media is presenting this as any other murder and Shaw as any other guy. The result: a hate crime may go uninvestigated.

• In November 2004, a trio of white males began hassling a patron of a Ballard restaurant, asking him if he were gay; the man politely assured them he wasn't. When the man left, one of the three walked up and decked him with a blow to the head, making him fall to the pavement, where he hit his head again, knocking him unconscious. The brave trio then took turns kicking their prey as he lay on the sidewalk, witnesses said. One of them kept shouting, "This is still Ballard!" But the incident was never handled by investigators as a bias crime, perhaps because the victim wasn't actually gay. The victim - who eventually recovered but suffered a number of long-term injuries as a result of the assault – eventually tired of the lack of response from police regarding his inquiries about a followup and approached the Seattle Gay News with his story, figuring that at least they would be interested in a gay-bashing assault, even if it was mistaken identity. Seattle police revisited the investigation but it had gone cold; no one was ever arrested or charged.

It's a common misconception, even within law enforcement, that the victim has to actually be who the perpetrator thinks for an assault or other offense to be a bias crime. In fact, the laws against bias crimes aren't predicated on the victim's actual status, because contrary to myth, the laws don't create "protected categories" of people. Rather, they focus on the state of mind of the perpetrator - whether a crime is motivated by an ethnic, religious, or sexual bias. That's why someone who assaults a turban-wearing Sikh for ostensibly being a Muslim terrorist is nonetheless committing a hate crime. Likewise, a gay-bashing in Ballard is still a gay-bashing, even if the victim is straight.

Crimes go unreported and uninvestigated all the time, of course, but when it happens with bias crimes, the result is especially poisonous for the larger community. Bias crimes are understood by experts to cause greater harm than ordinary crimes on three levels: the immediate victim, who typically sustains extraordinary psychological harm in addition to the extreme levels of violence that often occur in such cases; the minority community that is the larger target of the crimes, the underlying intent being to terrorize and drive them out; and the larger community, which then must wrestle with a blackened reputation and the internal animus and ethnic distrust created by the crimes.

So when police fail to respond adequately, the victim feels isolated, the target community believes it is not getting justice and can't trust authorities to provide it, and the larger community finds whatever bridges exist between ethnic communities are crumbling under the weight.

A series of incidents such as the ones described above alone might be cause for concern, but they are only anecdotal. It's more helpful, perhaps, to look at the bigger picture, to see what the numbers are in Seattle and to see how they compare to bias-crime trends nationally. When you do that, the picture that emerges is more of a mixed bag: Seattle actually does pretty well in dealing with bias crimes, though there still are problems.

A 2005 study by the Seattle LGBT Community Center looked at the 403 bias-related crime reports in the city between 2000 and 2005 and found that they occurred in every neighborhood, their numbers roughly rising and falling with general crime in those neighborhoods. Seattle had not just the largest sheer volume of bias crimes (unsurprising, since it's the largest city) but also the most enforcement, especially compared to most of the rest of Washington state. Nonetheless, the report noted that "there is a concern that the SPD data underreports the frequency of attacks that rise to the level of bias crime and malicious harassment."