NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch defended the department's recent shift in how it publicly reports hate crimes at a City Council hearing on Wednesday, saying a prior reporting method was "conflicting, wrong and confusing."
Tisch was responding to Council Speaker Julie Menin's questions about a Gothamist story that reported the change and included concerns from experts about the shift in the reporting method. The department shifted from reporting hate crimes that had been reported and were under review to reporting those that had been investigated and confirmed by officers.
Hate crime experts who spoke with Gothamist were concerned the new method could lead to an undercount of actual hate crimes in the city. One noted that a variety of factors, including police bias and witness cooperation, could lead to legitimate hate crimes not being confirmed.
Tisch pushed back on that notion on Wednesday, saying that reporting confirmed hate crimes would more accurately show the actual number of bias incidents in the city.
“I like to provide meaningful data to the public so we started reporting confirmed cases of hate crimes,” she said, adding that reporting hate crimes still under review made no sense and “was not a reflection of any reality.”
Despite the criticism of the prior reporting method, Tisch said the difference between reported hate crimes and those confirmed by the NYPD was a single case in February. “It does not make a huge difference in terms of understanding the overall picture of hate crimes in New York City,” she said.
In the Gothamist story, three professors who study hate crimes said reporting both complaints and confirmed cases would be more transparent and provide proper context about the prevalence of hate crimes in the city. They said reporting both figures would also make it easier to track the number of hate crimes over time.
Brendan Lantz, the director of Hate Crime Research and Policy Institute at Florida State University, said actual bias crimes could go unconfirmed for a variety of reasons. Factors like a witness refusing to cooperate with an investigation or police not finding enough evidence could result in an actual hate crime not being confirmed.
“There’s all kinds of things that can stand in between finding enough evidence to call a hate crime founded … that is not necessarily a direct result of if it’s a hate crime or not,” he said.
“When the reporting systems change, the numbers change, but the crimes aren’t actually changing. So it makes it very difficult … to actually be tracking these things long term,” he added.
Frank Pezzella, a professor at John Jay College and author of the book "The Measurement of Hate Crimes in America," added that he’s concerned the new reporting method will make it appear that hate crimes dropped in an overtime comparison.
“If you were to look at this on a trend line, it will look like there’s a precipitous drop, and that’s an inaccurate reflection of the actual prevalence and severity of hate crimes,” he said.
