Hate Crimes Unit

Crimes motivated by religious, ethnic, racial, gender, or sexual orientation-based bias or prejudice are especially egregious because of their clear intent to threaten entire groups of people far beyond the actual victim of the initial incident. These acts of “domestic terrorism” must not be tolerated in Fulton County, and the District Attorney’s Office intends to do everything it can to see that they are not.

To that end, in 1999, in anticipation of the passage of the State’s Hate Crimes legislation, the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office formed a specialized Hate Crimes Task Force made up of two senior assistant district attorneys, two investigators, victim-witness advocates, and administrative staff. The first task of this unit was to assist State Senator Vincent Fort with the crafting and ultimate passage of the legislation. The law went into effect in 2000, and, fortunately, for nearly two years, this Office had no such offenses reported that required the work of the task force. An April 2002 attack on two young African-American men in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood became the first case to put this unit (and, indeed, the State law) to the test and, at this time, has yet to be disposed.

Some facts bear out the need for such a Task Force. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports for 2000, four of Georgia’s 80 reporting agencies submitted hate crime incident reports, and the total number of incidents reported was 35. Of those 35, Atlanta accounted for 21 (11 of which were motivated by racial bias, eight by sexual orientation bias, and two by ethnicity bias). Most of the offenses reported in Georgia were for destruction of property/vandalism, while others were for assault and intimidation. Nationally, over half (53.8%) of reported incidents were motivated by racial bias, and over 64% of known offenders in these cases were white.