[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
CONFRONTING WHITE SUPREMACY (PART I):
THE CONSEQUENCES OF INACTION
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT
AND REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MAY 15, 2019
__________
Serial No. 116-23
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Reform
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COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND REFORM
ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland, Chairman
Carolyn B. Maloney, New York Jim Jordan, Ohio, Ranking Minority
Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of Member
Columbia Justin Amash, Michigan
Wm. Lacy Clay, Missouri Paul A. Gosar, Arizona
Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts Virginia Foxx, North Carolina
Jim Cooper, Tennessee Thomas Massie, Kentucky
Gerald E. Connolly, Virginia Mark Meadows, North Carolina
Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois Jody B. Hice, Georgia
Jamie Raskin, Maryland Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin
Harley Rouda, California James Comer, Kentucky
Katie Hill, California Michael Cloud, Texas
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Bob Gibbs, Ohio
John P. Sarbanes, Maryland Ralph Norman, South Carolina
Peter Welch, Vermont Clay Higgins, Louisiana
Jackie Speier, California Chip Roy, Texas
Robin L. Kelly, Illinois Carol D. Miller, West Virginia
Mark DeSaulnier, California Mark E. Green, Tennessee
Brenda L. Lawrence, Michigan Kelly Armstrong, North Dakota
Stacey E. Plaskett, Virgin Islands W. Gregory Steube, Florida
Ro Khanna, California
Jimmy Gomez, California
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York
Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts
Rashida Tlaib, Michigan
David Rapallo, Staff Director
Candyce Phoenix, Subcommittee Staff Director
Valerie Shen, SubcommitteeChief Counsel
Amy Stratton, Clerk
Christopher Hixon, Minority Staff Director
Contact Number: 202-225-5051
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Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Jamie Raskin, Maryland, Chairman
Carolyn B. Maloney, New York Chip Roy, Texas, Ranking Minority
Wm. Lacy Clay, Missouri Member
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Justin Amish, Michigan
Robin L. Kelly, Illinois Thomas Massie, Kentucky
Jimmy Gomez, California Mark Meadows, North Carolina
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Jody Hice, Georgia
Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of Michael Cloud, Texas
Columbia Carol D. Miller, West Virginia
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on May 15, 2019..................................... 1
Witnesses
Ms. Susan Bro, Co-Founder President/Board Chair, Heather Heyer
Foundation
Oral Statement................................................... 9
Mr. George Selim, Senior Vice President of Programs, Anti-
Defamation League
Oral Statement................................................... 10
Mr. Michael German, Fellow, Brennan Center for Justice
Oral Statement................................................... 12
Mr. Omar Ricci, Chairman, Islamic Center of Southern California
Oral Statement................................................... 14
Written statements of witnesses are available at the U.S. House
of Representatives Repository at: https://docs.house.gov.
Index of Documents
----------
The documents entered into the record during this hearing are
listed below, and are available at: https://docs.house.gov.
* ``Conservative Writer David French Tells How White
Supremacists Have Tormented His Family For Opposing Trump'',
The Christian Post, Oct. 24, 2016; submitted by Rep. Roy
* AAI Statement on Confronting White Supremacy
* Statement, the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under the
Law; submitted by Rep. Clay
* ``Trump sees immigrants as invaders. White-Nationalist
terrorists do, too'', Washington Post; submitted by Rep. Gomez
* Statement, Jason Kimelman-Block, director, Bend the Arc:
Jewish Action; submitted by Rep. Pressley
CONFRONTING WHITE SUPREMACY (PART I): THE CONSEQUENCES OF INACTION
----------
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,
Committee on Oversight and Reform,
Washington, D.C.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:08 p.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Jamie Raskin
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Raskin, Maloney, Clay, Wasserman
Schultz, Kelly, Gomez, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Norton, Roy,
Amash, Meadows, Miller, and Jordan (ex officio). Also present:
Representative Tlaib.
Mr. Raskin. The subcommittee hearing will come to order.
And without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a
recess of the subcommittee at any point.
This subcommittee is convening the first in a series of
hearings on confronting white supremacy, where we will focus on
the consequences of government policy and inaction.
And I will now recognize myself for five minutes to give an
opening Statement, and then turn it over to Mr. Roy from Texas
for his opening Statement. And we can start by rolling the
video.
Mr. Raskin. Okay. It is appearing, you can play it.
While we are waiting for that to come up, I just want to
thank all of our witnesses for coming today and everyone
attending.
All right. Well, we will let the images go, in any event,
in the background as I speak.
We all remember the terrifying trauma that shook
Charlottesville and the whole country just two years ago. But
did you know that that event does not appear in the 2017 FBI
hate crime statistics report? None of the violence which took
place on television before a horrified Nation even made it as a
statistic onto our national record of hate crimes. Not the
horrifying murder of Heather Heyer, which galvanized the
country against violent white supremacy, nor the 30 other
assaults, at least, committed by the Neo-Nazis and Klansmen who
converged on Charlottesville.
So why not? Charlottesville only reported one hate crime in
2017, and that occurred four months after these events. So why
did this festival of racial terror and hate crime not make it
into the FBI hate crime statistics report? That is one of the
questions that we seek to answer today about a serious threat
to American civil liberty, domestic tranquility, and the
general welfare.
Today's the subcommittee's first hearing on how America is
addressing the rise of a particular form of domestic terrorism:
violent white supremacy. Our purpose is to examine the scope
and nature of this terrorism, understand the problems the
government has in collecting relevant data about it, analyze
what the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are doing
and should be doing to address it, and then to ask whether the
administration is devoting attention and resources commensurate
to the magnitude of the threat.
The subcommittee is having a second hearing on June 4 with
officials from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security
because we want to hear detailed answers from them on these
questions and they've asked for more time to prepare their
answers.
The first question we're pursuing is what is the nature and
scope of the problem? The FBI hate crime statistics are
considered unreliable by many experts and substantially
undercount the real number of such events that are committed in
the United States.
From 2013 to 2017, the FBI reported on average 7,500 hate
crimes each year. But during the same period, the Bureau of
Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey
estimated on average 200,000 hate crimes annually. What
accounts for this disparity? We are going to try to figure it
out.
We want to hear about the problems affecting the reporting
system. The process for data collection seems to break down at
almost every level. Many hate crime victims do not trust law
enforcement enough to report incidents in the first place. Then
even among the hate crimes that are reported to local and State
authorities, thousands of them are never reported then to the
FBI. State and local law enforcement reporting to the FBI is
purely voluntary. Not all agencies participate, and of those
that do, only 12 percent reported any hate crimes at all in
2016.
In 2017, for example, the State of Mississippi only
reported one hate crime, and the State of Alabama reported nine
hate crimes. We had hundreds of hate crimes in my home State of
Maryland over the last three years, so it would be startling if
there were only one in Mississippi. We know from the work of
civil rights groups and local reporting that these numbers are
not accurate.
Amazingly, the FBI fails to include its own internal hate
crime statistics into their official numbers, citing technical
limitations that cannot be resolved until the year 2021. That's
pretty remarkable.
Beyond the methodological and statistical problems
besetting the information gathering process, we also face a
serious problem conceptualizing in naming the problem. When
Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, murdered nine
African American worshippers at a prayer service at the Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South
Carolina, on June 17, 2015, do we classify this explosion of
violence as domestic terrorism or do we simply call it a hate
crime and hope that it makes its way onto the illusive hate
crime statistics list?
When a violent anti-Semite entered the Tree of Life
synagogue in Pittsburgh during Shabbat morning services and
murdered 11 worshippers in the most deadly attack on the Jewish
community in American history, do we classify this explosion of
violence as domestic terrorism or do we call it a hate crime
and hope that it makes its way onto the FBI list?
This is not merely a matter of semantics, but it is
important to call things what they are. The innocent civilians
murdered in these attacks were definitely the victims of
terrorism.
This question of classifying white supremacist violence has
significant implications for resource allocation and the
seriousness with which the government and the Nation address
the problem. The FBI calls protecting the United States against
terrorist attacks the Bureau's No. 1 priority. FBI policy
instructs agents to open a parallel domestic terrorism
investigation whenever a suspect in a hate crime has a nexus to
any type of white supremacist extremist group, but often this
step is never taken in practice.
It is very important that we develop objective categories
and definitions so our classification of events has coherence
and integrity to it. The FBI called the December 2, 2015,
attack on the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino County,
which killed 14 people, domestic terrorism; and definitely it
was. The FBI called the June 12, 2016, Pulse nightclub mass
shooting in Florida, which took the lives of 49 people,
domestic terrorism; and definitely it was. But the FBI did not
call the deadly white supremacist attacks and mass shooting at
the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston or at the Tree of
Life synagogue domestic terrorism. It did not call the deadly
violence that took place in Charlottesville domestic terrorism.
But why not? Surely it cannot be because the perpetrators
in San Bernardino County, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen
Malik, were non-White Muslims; and that the perpetrator in
Orlando, Florida, Omar Mateen, was a non-White Muslim; while
the murderers in Charleston, Pittsburgh, and Charlottesville
were Dylann Roof, Robert Gregory Bowers, and James Alex Fields,
all White males.
This kind of categorization would obviously violate our
essential constitutional values. The racial or religious
identity of the perpetrator cannot define the character of the
crime. All of the victims of all of these crimes perished
because the killers wanted to destroy lives based on their
racism, homophobia, religious hatred, or other forms of group
bias. Surely all of these victims died in terrorist violence.
But then what explains the FBI labeling the San Bernardino
attack domestic terrorism but not the attacks in Charleston,
Pittsburgh, or Charlottesville?
Whatever its cause, this dilution and disorientation of the
concept of terrorism has important resource and budgetary
implications. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Islamic
extremism, which the FBI classifies as a form of international
terrorism, was responsible for 23 percent of the extremist
murders we saw in the U.S. from 2009 to 2018. Far-right
extremism, or what the FBI at least theoretically classifies as
domestic terrorism, was responsible for 73 percent of the
fatalities caused by extremist violence during that same
period. Yet the FBI devotes its resources almost exactly
backward to these proportions.
The FBI apparently spends 80 percent of its resources
addressing international terrorism in this field and only 20
percent addressing domestic terrorism. Why is that?
Despite all of the problems causing the undercount of white
supremacist violence, the data still shows us that hate crimes
are sharply on the rise. Last year, the FBI reported over 7,000
hate crime incidents in 2017, a 17 percent increase from the
prior year and a 31 percent increase over 2014. During those
same four years, hate crimes against African Americans rose by
20 percent. They rose--anti-Semitic hate crimes rose by 35
percent, anti-Latino hate crimes rose by 43 percent, and anti-
Muslim hate crimes rose by 44 percent.
The Trump administration is not correctly naming the
problem and it is not aggressively addressing it either. The
Department of Homeland Security appears to be mismanaging the
available resources. The administration dismantled DHS'
infrastructure to counter violent extremism and white
supremacy. Under the Obama Administration, the Department
created an Office of Community Partnerships which administered
grants to local community groups and partnered with law
enforcement. Partnerships with local groups is considered by
experts to be an extremely effective way to prevent
radicalization, because many communities do not trust local law
enforcement.
The Trump administration rescinded the grants awarded to
organizations working to counter white supremacist extremism.
Recent news reports indicate that after this year, DHS will
dismantle the grant program altogether. DHS also renamed the
Office of Community Partnerships the Office of Terrorism
Prevention Partnerships in August 2017, and renamed it again to
Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention in April 2019. This
reflects the shift away from prevention and toward only law
enforcement.
In the prior administration, this office had 16 full-time
employees, 25 contractors, and a budget of $21 million, but
this administration has reduced it to eight employees and a
budget of $3 million.
The Obama Administration's DHS established an interagency
Countering Violent Extremism Task Force, which included the
FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Departments
of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services. It was
disbanded in this administration and now exists in name only.
Recently, it was reported that the Department of Homeland
Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis disbanded a
group of analysts focused on domestic terrorism, which reduced
the number of analytic reports on white supremacy. Step by step
DHS has simply dismantled the infrastructure necessary to
counter the threat precisely at the time when the threat is
growing to levels we have not seen in many, many years.
Real Americans are being killed in their churches, in their
mosques, and in their synagogues, in movie theaters, and in
public places. Racial and religious mass killings inspired by
white supremacy and other forms of tribal and religious hatred
are a plague on the Earth, and the American society is
suffering now along with the rest of the world.
It is the primary goal of government under our social
contract to make it safer than we would be in a State of war.
Yet when it comes to white supremacist terror, the single
greatest domestic terrorist threat to the American people we
have, we are falling down on the job.
As I mentioned at the outset, this will be only the first
of several hearings on white supremacist terror. We will have
the agencies here in June to address these same issues. In the
meantime, I look forward to hearing from these expert witnesses
today on what the FBI and Homeland Security can and should be
doing to combat this pernicious terror in the land.
And we will show you the video now, and then I'm going to
turn it over to you, Mr. Roy. Forgive me for our technical
difficulties.
[Video shown.]
Mr. Raskin. Okay. And I'll turn it over to the ranking
member, Mr. Roy.
Mr. Roy. Mrs. Bro, are you Okay?
Well, I want to thank all the witnesses for taking the time
to join us today and for their service, whether that has been
in law enforcement or in the arena of ideas or whether it was
in a mother who lost her daughter. I just want to appreciate
you all taking the time to be here, and it is very much
appreciated that you take the time to do that.
Particularly, I do want to thank you, Mrs. Bro, for coming
and continuing to share your perspective on the issues with
speaking as a parent the courage to set aside the unimaginable
loss of your daughter--I have a daughter and a son--at the
hands of the forces of evil that we saw in display in this
video.
I am all too familiar with the surroundings of what I just
saw in Charlottesville, whether it is the downtown mall, the
last images we just saw.
As a double alumnus of the University of Virginia, I spent
a lot of my life in Charlottesville. I spent hours there in
peace and tranquility, celebration, sports rallies down on the
downtown mall, to restaurants. That's where I worked my first
political campaign, literally two blocks from where we just saw
that footage, in the House of Delegates race in Virginia.
And then obviously in August 2017, I joined the Nation
watching in horror as this traditionally peaceful pedestrian
plaza turned to death and destruction on the heels of marchers
spewing the racist venom that we just saw. I could not believe
it.
With tiki torches on the north side of the rotunda by Mr.
Jefferson's statue, we saw a group of mostly or all White men
marching as or with Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, chanting hateful
things such as the Jews will not replace us, as we just saw,
while carrying torches reminiscent of Nazi marches or the worst
and most active days of the KKK.
It was a far cry from a place I spent hundreds of hours of
my life hanging out or passing by, living, myself, in one of
those historical buildings we saw with the white columns that
they were just walking by. I lived in one of those rooms built
by Mr. Jefferson.
It was a far cry from the intellectual give-and-take that
resulted in growth and maturity in the arena of ideas, a
university that was moving from a southern university that had
become co-educational 20 years before I joined it. It was a far
cry from my teammates on the University of Virginia golf team
who came from around the world, Germany, Italy, Zimbabwe, where
my dear friend, who has unfortunately since departed this Earth
to be with our Heavenly Father, Lewis Chitengwa, helped me
learn a little of what it was like for him, a young Black man
growing up in Zimbabwe and becoming the first Black to win the
South African Open in the mid 1990's, which was a fairly big
deal, as you might imagine.
To be clear, while they have a right to spew their vile
notions, so long as it stops short of inciting violence, there
is literally no defense for associating with these groups.
There is no place for this in civil discourse. And there's a
problem, be it relatively small or large, in the subject of
this hearing and beyond with at least some groups of White
individuals perpetuating racism. Some refer to it as the alt
right. These terms are loaded, to be honest. I don't really
like to adopt them because they're usually either created by
the same jackasses spewing hate or often the groups whose
existence is based on the continuation of identity politics.
But the real problem--but this problem is real. For
example, let's look at the attacks on David and Nancy French,
two great thinkers with whom I do not always agree, and their
family, from the article that I would like to be added to the
record, without objection.
Mr. Raskin. Without objection, it will be entered.
Mr. Roy. Because of the alt-right--this is a quote from
that article: Because of the alt-right's sick obsession with
racial preservation, what has really raised the ire about David
French is that he and his wife have an adopted daughter from
Ethiopia. Among the many chilling things alt-righties sent him
were photoshopped images of his daughter's face in gas
chambers, with a smiling picture of the President in a Nazi
uniform preparing to press a button and kill her, and vile
messages laced with racial epithets asserting that his wife had
slept with Black men while he was deployed in Iraq.
She went on to add: In the past, leftwingers have also
attacked the French family for having a Black adopted child,
accusing them of not raising her with the right values since
they are unapologetically conservative.
What is happening to our Nation? Why are we at each others'
throats, quite frankly, all too often literally?
This hearing will perhaps allow us to explore the contours
of how we investigate, manage, and stop the threats of violence
from racist evildoers. And to be clear, that's what we're
talking about, whatever they call themselves. But as we go
through this, it is important that we recall the talking about
how divided we are. Focusing so much of our time and energy on
race and identity politics can itself be at least one of the
forces at play in causing division.
Of course we should address this issue, but how we do it
matters. Casting blame and large nets of accusation beyond the
locust of the hate only causes more people to retreat to
entrenched corners.
To be clear, a relatively conservative American of any
race, who either partially or fully supports the President, for
example, perhaps even wearing a MAGA hat, should not be labeled
a racist for doing so. I remember getting some rather evil and
disgusting things said my way because I was a supporter of
Senator Cruz, as his former chief of staff. There are people in
the world who say hateful things.
But an American of a particular minority group who self-
identifies as a Conservative should not be the target of scorn
or hate because some other, as I said before, jackasses who are
hateful bigots wrongfully define themselves as alt-right,
again, whatever that means on the political ideological
spectrum. But all too often that happens and it is offensive
and divisive.
And it is also important that we keep in mind perspective.
And I look forward to hearing from the witnesses, particularly
those of you in law enforcement who have had a history of
working on these kinds of things. I know the ADL report, for
example, focuses on murders in 2017. And I believe that we're
going to talk about 18 of 34 extremist murders are tied to the
alt-right or similar in various articles that I've seen, and
that is troubling. Of course, perspective is important when
there were 17,000 murders in the United States in 2017. So we
have got a resource issue. We have got State and local and
Federal resources that we've got to manage.
And it is important that we keep in mind the perspective,
our focus, on extremism. It is true that domestically it is
important to stop groups from targeting Americans no matter the
group or the reason. As a former Federal prosecutor myself who
wants to see bad guys behind bars and away from innocent
Americans, it is also true that in light of 3,000 dead
Americans on 9/11, in an attack on our own Pentagon in a downed
plane, as we see continued presence of Islamic extremist forces
abroad with al-Qaida continuing with the Taliban resurgent in
Afghanistan, that national defense dictates a continued focus
on international Islamic terrorism with vast networks in the
United States, that these networks have proven that they exist
and they are part of a large vast network designed to undermine
our Nation and our allies.
Those networks reach into our communities where we, and as
my colleague here likely agrees, seek to protect American
rights while allowing tools to stop terrorism.
And that No. 2, regarding domestic terrorism, the American
people are kind of funny about not wanting domestic
surveillance and prefer to police Americans a little bit the
old-fashioned way using the thousands of state, local, and
Federal laws on the books to do that.
I just want that perspective, I think, to be a part of what
we discuss, and I look forward to hearing from each of you. And
I cannot reiterate enough my thanks for your taking time to be
here, and again, particularly, Mrs. Bro, for what you are
doing. Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Mr. Roy, thank you very much.
And I'm yielding a couple of minutes to my friend, Mr.
Jordan from Ohio, who is the ranking member of the Oversight
Committee.
Mr. Jordan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll make it a couple
of seconds or a few seconds, if I could.
I want to associate myself with the ranking member's
comments as well. And I appreciate you having this important
hearing.
Ms. Bro, thank you. Well, all our witnesses, but in
particular, Ms. Bro, for you being here. We want to extend to
you and your family our deepest sympathies. Your daughter, in
the face of hate, stood for decency, civility, and made clear
that bigotry has no place in our society. And tragically, she
lost her life standing up for those values, those virtues,
those important principles. And so we all appreciate you being
here today carrying on her legacy.
There is no place in America for hate. It must be condemned
any time, any place it rears its ugly head. Scripture says
this: The one who hates his brothers in the darkness and walks
in the darkness and does not know where he is going because the
darkness has blinded his eyes.
Today's hearing is about shining light, shining light on
all forms of hatred.
And so again, I want to thank the witnesses who are going
to testify, and the chairman and the ranking member for their
comments, and for the time that we can focus on shining light
on behavior that is just in no way acceptable, in no way should
be tolerated.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you so much, Mr. Jordan.
I will now welcome our witnesses, beginning with Mrs. Bro.
Susan Bro the president and board chair of the Heather Heyer
Foundation, an organization that she founded in honor of her
brave daughter, Heather Heyer, whose name now lives
imperishably in the pantheon of American heroes who gave their
lives fighting for equality for all and civil rights and civil
liberties for all Americans. I never had the good fortune to
meet your daughter, Mrs. Bro, but my sister lives in
Charlottesville with her husband, their three kids, a lot of
family there. And as you know, Charlottesville is a very
intimate community. I know lots of people who knew Heather
Heyer, and everyone says that she just had a heart of gold and
was the most splendid, magnificent person. And so we thank you
for standing up from the first days when this happened and
making such a moving speech at the memorial service for Heather
and for standing strong, for bringing us back together as a
people, and for countering violence, white supremacy, and
terrorism.
Next will be George Selim, who is the senior vice president
of programs for the Anti-Defamation League. Prior to joining
ADL, Mr. Selim served in the administrations of Presidents
Bush, Obama, and Trump. He was the founding director of the
Department of Homeland Security's Office of Community
Partnerships and the DHS' Countering Violent Extremism Task
Force.
Michael German is a fellow at the Brennan Center for
Justice's Liberty and National Security program. He's a 16-year
veteran of Federal law enforcement who served as a special
agent for the FBI specializing in domestic terrorism.
Omar Ricci is the chairperson for the Islamic Center of
Southern California and former chairperson of the Muslim
Political Action Committee. He also serves as a reserve officer
for the Los Angeles Police Department.
Roy Austin is a partner at Harris, Wiltshire, and Grannis,
LLP. Earlier in his career he was a hate crimes prosecutor for
the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division and served as
the deputy assistant general for the Division.
And finally, Robby Soave is an associate editor at Reason
Magazine, and serves on the D.C. advisory committee to the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights.
I want to welcome all of you and thank you for coming, and
I will begin by swearing you in.
Please rise, if you would, and raise your right hand.
Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you're about to
give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you God?
Thank you very much.
Let the record show the witnesses all answered in the
affirmative.
Thank you. You may be seated.
The microphones are sensitive, so please make sure they're
on and please speak directly into them. Without objection, your
full written Statements will be made part of record and you
will be recognized for five minutes.
With that, Ms. Bro, you are now recognized.
STATEMENT OF SUSAN BRO, PRESIDENT/BOARD CHAIR, HEATHER HEYER
FOUNDATION
Ms. Bro. Good morning--or good afternoon, pardon me.
Chairman Raskin, Ranking Member Roy, and members of the
committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak before you
today.
Ms. Bro. My name is Susan Bro. I'm the mother of Heather
Heyer. Heather--I'm going to diverge a little bit from the
written record here and just tell her story quickly very
quickly.
Heather was not a known activist in the community, but she
worked as a paralegal in a bankruptcy firm, and she practiced
justice, she practiced fairness, she practiced understanding
people. She also worked as a bartender and a waitress, and she
cared about people genuinely.
Most of the girls in her office were people of color. And
Heather had always believed in fairness and justice for people,
so she stood in solidarity with them.
She wasn't originally going to go down to join the
protestors that day, but once she saw her friend Courtney's
video of Friday night, she said, I have to go. Her best friend
said, Don't go, you could die. And she said, I know, but I have
to go. Of course, when we say those things, we don't really
think we're going to.
People came from 35 States that day to make a stand in
Charlottesville. Some were told it was for freedom of speech,
some were told it was to prevent the erosion of White rights.
Some were told it was to take a stand against people of all
colors and religions other than what they perceive to be
Eurocentric values.
A young man who had been consumed by hate for many years
had been led astray by the Nazi beliefs that he saw online, and
he made a point to practice those beliefs that day. He came
from Ohio, slept in his car, and got up the next morning and
joined the forces with shield, with his white polo and his
khakis. He wore a helmet, and he yelled racial epithets and
Jewish--and anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim and anti-everything
else phrases that day.
As everyone was leaving town after the Governor called for
an emergency situation, James Fields followed another car down
4th Street. The other car stopped, so he backed up. He sat at
the top of the hill. And while he was sitting at the top of the
hill--I don't know what he was doing, maybe he was looking at
his GPS for a few seconds--the crowd that Heather was in that
was made up of all kinds of people were celebrating the fact
that the Nazis had left and they were going to the downtown
mall to celebrate and gather forces, get some water, get some
sandwiches, and he chose to accelerate forward.
He had a very clear view of them as they came up 4th
Street. There was no one around his car when he made that
choice. He accelerated so fast that when he hit the white car
in front of him, it instantly accelerated to 17 miles an hour.
Heather's aorta was severed in four places. She spun through
the air, leaving skin and blood on his windshield, smashing his
front windshield. My daughter was probably dead by the time she
hit the ground, but they didn't know that. They sent her to the
emergency room. And from the emergency room, they tried to
revive her, not knowing she had actually been dead for 20
minutes before she got there.
Now, parents lose their children all the time. I'm not
special in that way. But because my daughter was a White girl,
the whole world lost their mind and suddenly showed up on my
doorstep. I've said, I'm not happy about giving my daughter up,
but if I'm going to give her up, I'm going to make her death
count. So I'm using the platform that has been given me because
of my daughter's death to carry forward in her work.
And I want to say to you, we have to do a better job of
reporting hate crime, but we also have to do a better job of
preventing hate crime. We have to find ways to reach these
young people before they become radicalized. How we go about
that I leave to greater minds. But I want you to think about my
daughter and others who have died because of hate.
Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you for that very powerful and moving
testimony, Ms. Bro. And thank you for coming to join us.
Mr. Selim, you're recognized for five minutes.
STATEMENT OF GEORGE SELIM, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF PROGRAMS,
ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE
Mr. Selim. Thank you.
Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Roy,
distinguished members of this subcommittee. My name is George
Selim. I serve as the senior vice president for programs at the
ADL, the Anti-Defamation League. It is indeed an honor to
appear before you today to address the issue of white supremacy
and the threat it poses to all of our communities.
Thank you to my fellow panelists for being here today as
well. In particular, I wanted to thank Susan for sharing about
her daughter Heather. I deeply admire the work you are doing,
Susan. And at ADL and in communities across the country we
stand by you in your fight against the hatred that took her
life.
Unfortunately, in the short time since the Unite the Right
rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, white supremacist
violence has continued to shatter many families across the
country and across the globe. Families in Pittsburgh, in
Christchurch, in Poway, and other places have been affected by
this insidious form of violence. More can be done to counter
this threat, and more must be done before the next inevitable
tragedy.
I have served at the Department of Homeland Security, the
Department of Justice, and at the White House on the National
Security Council. I watched the rise of ISIS and the full-
throated government response to counter it. Now, the rise of
white supremacist terrorism poses a similarly serious threat.
Yet instead of scaling up to meet the threat, the government
seems to be scaling down. Fewer resources dedicated to
preventing encountering extremism and little transparency and
accountability with respect to how the government sees this
threat and what it is specifically doing to counter it.
The University of Maryland START Center found that from 9/
11 through 2017, 71 percent of Islamist-inspired extremists in
the U.S. were interdicted in the planning phase of their
terrorist plots. On the other hand, far-right extremists, the
inverse is the case. Nearly 71 percent managed to successfully
commit their acts of violence.
And so the question before us, as you noted, Mr. Chairman,
is why? It is paramount to counter extremism in all its forms.
At this time today, white supremacist extremism warrants far
greater attention than it currently receives. Our ADL data has
shown that in the last year, of the 50 murders that were
committed at the hands of extremists, all but one were linked
to right-wing extremism, and 78 percent were tied to white
supremacy specifically.
Last year was the deadliest year for the Jewish community
and the third highest on record for anti-Semitic incidents in
the United States. This form of hate targets not only Jews,
African Americans, Muslims, non-White immigrants, and the LGBTQ
community as well. The data is clear: The white supremacist
threat in the United States is at disturbingly high levels, and
we must work together now to ensure that the worst is not yet
to come.
Like other forms of extremism, white supremacists seek to
spread their ideology. Most believe in a conspiracy theory that
the White race, as Susan noted, is in danger of extinction due
to the rising number of non-Whites who are, quote, controlled
and manipulated by Jews, and that their eminent action is
needed, in their view, to, quote, save the White race. Then
they convince other adherents that they must act immediately to
counter that perceived threat, which manifests itself in the
form of hate and violence.
Not only do white supremacist extremists spread this
propaganda through fliers and banners and events, but on the
internet, on social media as well. Ranging from mainstream
platforms like Gab and 8chan, where they are proselytizing and
conspiring, and are less scrutinized, in many instances, of the
public eye.
Today's propaganda is tomorrow's hate and violence in our
communities. More can and must be done to counter this threat
and prevent it from getting worse. Instead of increasing
intelligence into the domestic terrorist threats, the
Department of Homeland Security has discontinued prevention
grants entirely and has sharply reduced the number of terrorism
prevention staff.
The FBI in its own testimony last week admitted to having
fewer resources to counter domestic terrorism than
international terrorism. The National Counterterrorism Center
does not currently view domestic terrorism as within its legal
remit. These things need to change immediately. All of this,
while white supremacists continue to proselytize and mobilize
across the country and across the globe. More can be done and
more must be done. ADL urges swift and comprehensive action to
counter the threat of white supremacy specifically.
A few things to list off, which we can get into more in the
question and answer. Our first recommendation is we need to
speak out much more strongly and decisively against white
supremacy at all levels and all leadership at the Federal,
State and local level. Second, to urgently consider legislative
proposals designed to improve the government's ability to
counter the threat. Three, to invest in prevention efforts to
stop this threat from getting worse. Four, to improve and
increase our data and reporting on hate crimes and bias-
motivated incidents across the United States. And last, to work
with the technology sector to advance commonsense solutions to
prevent the abuse on their platforms by white supremacists and
their adherence.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you very much, Mr. Selim.
Mr. German, let me come to you.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL GERMAN, FELLOW, BRENNAN CENTER FOR
JUSTICE; OMAR RICCI, CHAIRPERSON, ISLAMIC CENTER OF SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA
Mr. German. Chairman Raskin, Ranking Member Roy, and
members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to
testify today.
White supremacist violence is a persistent problem in the
United States. And Congress has given the Justice Department
powerful tools to address it, as the Brennan Center documented
in our report ``Wrong Priorities on Fighting Terrorism.''
I used these tools as an FBI undercover agent assigned to
domestic terrorism investigations against white supremacists
and militia groups planning acts of violence in the 1990's.
Today, however, Justice Department policies deprioritize the
identification, investigation, and prosecution of these violent
crimes.
When white supremacists commit deadly attacks, such as the
recent mass shooting at a San Diego synagogue, their crimes fit
the definitions of both domestic terrorism and hate crimes. The
laws governing these crimes all carry substantial penalties,
but their designation as domestic terrorism or hate crime has
consequences.
Terrorism investigations are the FBI's No. 1 priority and
are well resourced. Civil rights violations like hate crimes
rank fifth out eight priorities. More problematic, as a matter
of policy, the Justice Department defers the vast majority of
hate crime investigations to State and local law enforcement,
without any Federal evaluation to determine if the perpetrators
are part of a violent white supremacist group. State and local
law enforcement are often ill-equipped or unwilling to properly
respond to these crimes.
As a result, and in spite of a congressional mandate to
track bias crimes, the Justice Department doesn't know how many
people white supremacists attack and kill each year, leaving
intelligence analysts and policymakers in the dark about the
scope of this violence.
Victim surveys suggest there are approximately 230,000
violent hate crimes per year. In 2017, the 12 percent of State
and local agencies that acknowledged hate crimes occurring in
their jurisdictions identified 7,175 incidents involving 8,800
victims, including 990 aggravated assaults, 15 murders, and 23
rapes.
The Justice Department, in contrast, prosecutes only about
25 hate crimes defendants each year. While white supremacist
attacks represent just a tiny proportion of the violence that
takes place in the United States, these crimes require specific
attention because they pose a persistent threat to vulnerable
communities, particularly communities of color, immigrants,
LGBTQ people, women, the disabled, and religious minorities.
These crimes are intended to threaten and intimidate entire
communities, and they demand a government response that more
effectively addresses this communal injury,
The Justice Department officials have been calling for
broad new domestic terrorism powers, but new laws are
unnecessary and may cause harm. As the Justice Department
continues to treat protests as terrorism, particularly in its
monitoring of minority-led movements, like Native American
water protectors and Black Lives Matter activists, falsely
framed as Black identity extremists.
Congress should ensure that counterterrorism resources are
directed toward the most lethal threats. Seven U.S. Senators
have recently complained that the FBI's reorganization of its
domestic terrorism program categories seem intended to mask the
scope of white supremacist violence and the resources it
devotes to investigating it.
Congress should require the Justice Department to collect
accurate data about white supremacist violence and bias crimes.
Further, it should explore new responses to hate crimes that
are designed to ensure victimized communities are both safer
and more resilient.
First, minority communities are victims of many kinds of
violence, including at the hands of law enforcement, and are
often denied equal justice when they seek--equal protection
when they seek justice. Half of the violent crime in the United
States goes unsolved each year, including 40 percent of the
homicides and 64 percent of the rapes. Black, Native American,
and migrant victims are disproportionally represented in these
unsolved crimes.
The lack of equal protection leads to broken trust with law
enforcement, as is reflected in the Justice Department's crime
victim surveys, which indicate more than half of hate crime
victimizations are not reported to police. And only 4 percent
of reported hate crimes result in arrest.
A comprehensive strategy to protect these communities from
white supremacist violence must include measures to address
these law enforcement disparities and reform police practices.
Second, the current purely penal approach to white
supremacist violence did little to assuage community fear, and
so should the vision that these crime create. Research suggests
that hate crimes victims overwhelmingly prefer educational
programs and restorative justice responses that challenge
underlying prejudice. Congress should study restorative justice
methods and develop a plan to implement these practices
whenever far-right terrorism or hate crimes occur to build a
safer, more inclusive, and tolerant society.
Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you very much, Mr. German.
Mr. Ricci.
STATEMENT OF OMAR RICCI, CHAIRMAN, ISLAMIC CENTER OF SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA
Mr. Ricci. Thank you, Chairman Raskin.
And first, on behalf of the Muslim Public Affairs Council
and the Islamic Center of Southern California, we want to
convey our condolences to you, Ms. Bro, and to your family. We
pray that your daughter's soul is in the highest levels of
heaven and in bliss.
Chairman Raskin, Ranking Member Roy, and honorable members
of the Oversight Committee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,
my name is Omar Ricci. And I would like to thank you for the
opportunity and the honor to testify on the impact of white
supremacy on American Muslims.
While I am here today to share my experiences as an
American Muslim, as a chairperson of an Islamic center, and as
a police officer. Prior to coming here, I also have sought the
advice from others, particularly with my friends in the Jewish
community, African American community, and the LGBT community.
For whatever the path forward to deal with that current
outbreak of white supremacy, we must first acknowledge, honor,
and pay tribute to, and learn from the historic sacrifices of
African Americans and Jewish Americans who have made for our
Nation. We are standing on their shoulders.
I am a proud police officer with the Los Angeles Police
Department. However, to be clear, I am not testifying in that
capacity, and the views shared in this testimony are mine
alone.
I am 50 years old, born in New York City to a Pakistani
immigrant mother and a second generation Italian Irish father.
I am married and I have four daughters, one of whom is
accompanying me here today.
For the past 10 years, it has been my incredible honor to
be a reserve police officer with the LAPD, a police agency that
sets a global model. And I have worked in various capacities,
including basic street patrol, counterterrorism and special
operations, and community engagement.
In being a police officer, it is my desire to carry on a
great tradition of our country, which is civic duty, and
carrying out a mandate of my faith that Muslims should work to
better the society they live in. In that role, and in the
context of this hearing, I have responded to hate crimes
against African Americans and have seen their devastating
impact firsthand, the distraught, the pain, the emotional and
physical turmoil, and more.
In the immediate aftermath of the Tree of Life synagogue
terrorist attack, I suited up to provide extra patrols around
synagogues, knowing that the presence of a police car and a
uniformed officer serves to both deter criminals and provide a
feeling of security to the Jewish community.
The same was done for mosques and the Muslim community in
the aftermath of the Christchurch attacks. Synagogues and
mosques are officially in the crosshairs of white supremacists.
The 65-year-old mosque which I currently chair is a
distinct American institution, prominent on the local and
national scene. It is impossible to describe all that it does
for Muslims and non-Muslims, but it does much. It feeds over
200 needy, mostly non-Muslim senior citizens at our weekly food
pantry. It serves as a polling place for voters. It actively
participates with Mayor Eric Garcetti's office to try and
figure solutions to the homeless. And finally, it is the
institution that created the concept of an American Muslim
identity that declares there is no incongruence between being a
practicing Muslim and a patriotic American.
The fact that I'm a police officer has not shielded me or
my mosque from experiencing hate firsthand. Whether it is the
arrest of an individual who threatened to kill one of our staff
members and was found to have a cache of semiautomatic weapons
and thousands of rounds of ammunition or receiving a piece of
mail addressed to me personally with a feces-smeared page from
the Quran with a hate note that I cannot read here in the oral
setting but I've placed in my written testimony, there should
be no doubt that hate is on the rise.
This past weekend alone, a mosque was set ablaze in New
Haven, Connecticut. In March, an arsonist set fire to a mosque
in California, and that arsonist turned out to be the same
terrorist who attacked and murdered at the Poway, California,
synagogue.
These are just the latest attacks. There are countless
reports of Muslims having their hijabs ripped off their head.
Bullying and taunting of Muslim children in public schools has
been commonplace. And there has been a distinct and troubling
rise and hate toward my community since the 2016 Presidential
election cycle. One study found over 226 percent increase in
hate crimes in counties where candidate Donald Trump held a
rally.
Respected Members of Congress, words matter. It is no
secret that President Trump has an animus toward my faith by
saying things like Islam hates us and by instituting his Muslim
ban, and it is whipping up a mob mentality.
Contrast those words to the more calm and sober Statements
from President Bush after 9/11 that, quote: ``Those who feel
like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their
anger don't represent the best of America. They represent the
worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of
behavior.''
Thank you for your time.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Mr. Ricci.
Mr. Austin.
STATEMENT OF ROY L. AUSTIN, PARTNER, HARRIS, WILTSHIRE &
GRANNIS, LLP
Mr. Austin. Chair Raskin and Ranking Member Roy and
honorable members of this committee and, Mrs. Bro, thank you so
much for your words today.
As someone who has spent years prosecuting hate crimes,
supervising those who prosecute hate crimes, and working on
policy at the highest level to enhance hate crime prevention
and reporting, I have very strong feelings about today's topic.
Disappointingly, we do not have the slightest idea how many
hate crimes there are in America, and we have never known. The
numbers currently kept by the FBI are largely useless. The
majority of States and the vast majority of law enforcement
agencies either do not bother to report or do not bother to
report accurate numbers.
The best inference that can be drawn from the current data
is that the environment created by the current Presidential
administration, things have gotten worse. Hate crimes have
increased.
What is particularly shocking about this is that law
enforcement agencies regularly speak about the importance of
using data to perform better and keep this country safer.
Increasingly, law enforcement agencies want to use artificial
intelligence to engage in what they call predictive policing.
But artificial intelligence with bad data is nothing more than
junk science, also described as garbage in, garbage out.
If we as a country were serious about using science and
data to stop crime, particularly hate crimes, we would fix our
data tomorrow. It's not that hard.
The importance of collecting good data could hardly be
overstated. While every crime is significant, the harm can be
exponential when the subject targeted the victim based on hate.
The pain or fear from hate crimes reaches a broader community.
The act is an anathema to who we are as a Nation built on
diversity.
While we and every Black church in America mourn the murder
of nine Black people in Emanuel AME in Charleston, South
Carolina, the congregation of every Black church asked whether
they might be next. While we and every synagogue in America
mourn the murder of 11 Jewish people at the Tree of Life
synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the parishioners of
every synagogue in America asks whether they might be next. And
sadly, the parishioners of Chabad of Poway synagogue in San
Diego, California, know that that fear is justified. And it is
just one example of the horrific reach of hate crimes.
Less than two weeks after 50 Muslims were murdered in New
Zealand, someone tried to set fire to a mosque outside of San
Diego, California, while people were inside. And the
perpetrators vandalized that mosque, citing the New Zealand
attack. Their fear is justified.
What exacerbates our hate crime data problem is the fact
that the Federal Government does not even publish its own hate
crimes numbers. None of the DOJ components that work on hate
crimes regularly publish data about their work in an easily
accessible location. How can the Federal Government expect
State and local law enforcement to publish data when it does
not do so itself? It only requires a quick look at the FBI hate
crime statistics to realize just how unhelpful they are.
If you look, one might notice that the most up-to-date
statistics are from 2017. We are now almost halfway through
2019, and we still do not have national statistics for 2018.
Second, there are approximately 18,000 law enforcement
agencies in the United States, and around 2,000 agencies don't
even bother to respond to the FBI, and they suffered no
consequences for not doing so. And from the approximately 1,600
agencies, those that responded, there were only approximately
7,000 reported hate crime incidents. Of course, this is more
than 1,000 more than there were in 2016 and more than 300 more
than there were in 2015.
Now, the same Department of Justice that publishes the
Uniform Crime Report, where those numbers come, from also
publishes the National Crime Victimization Survey. According to
the NCVS, there were over 200,000 hate crimes in 2017. Of
those, the victims said they reported over 100,000 to the
police, and of those, more than 1,500 victimizations they said
the police actually acknowledged to them that it was in fact a
hate crime. How do we get from 200,000 to 7,000? Only through
intentional irresponsibility.
Eleven suggestions for how we could improve the current
system. First, stop vilifying Muslims, LGBTQ individuals, and
immigrants, and stop calling white supremacists fine people.
This should be obvious, but sadly it needs to be said. Second,
treat all crimes the same. It should not matter who the
perpetrator is or who the victim is. Third, stop using bad data
to make law enforcement policy and decisions. Fourth, encourage
people to report. Fifth, instruct students in school about hate
crimes, and teach kids how yesterday's hate-filled vandalism or
Instagram rant becomes today's cross burning and becomes
tomorrow's murder. Six, make reporting mandatory. Seven,
actually audit the reports. Eight, publish the data quarterly.
Nine, work with affinity groups to encourage reporting. Ten,
get Federal agencies to report. Eleven, just plain better
reports.
We cannot fully understand hate crimes without good data.
We will also not be able to determine what works and does not
work to end hate crimes if we do not improve the data.
Thank you very much.
Mr. Raskin. Mr. Austin, thank you very much. Thank you.
And, Mr. Soave.
STATEMENT OF ROBBY SOAVE, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, REASON MAGAZINE
Mr. Soave. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Roy, and
committee members, for inviting me to speak. And thank you for
convening a hearing on such an important subject.
I am humbled by this opportunity, not just to testify, but
to learn from my fellow panelists. And thank you, Ms. Bro, for
your courageous testimony.
My name is Robby Soave. I'm an editor at a magazine called
Reason, and a member of the D.C. advisory committee to the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights. I am also the author of a book
titled ``Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump,''
which is the culmination of years of research on the tactics
and goals of various political activist groups that have
emerged on the right and the left. It includes a chapter about
the rise of the white nationalist fringe group that we know as
the alt-right.
As part of my research, I have interviewed alt-right
activists and thought leaders, including their nominal leader,
Richard Spencer, as part of an attempt to better understand
where these ideas come from and how to combat them.
It is an indisputable fact that white nationalism and white
supremacy are pernicious ideologies with a long history of
terrorizing communities of color in the United States and that
their current manifestation in the form of the alt-right should
be confronted and condemned. However, as we begin our
discussion today, I would urge us not to overestimate the
current threat posed by white nationalism.
It is all too easy to give them more attention than they
deserve, because the sentiments they express are so abhorrent.
But these violent extremists constitute a fringe group. While
they are loud online, they are not numerous. With rare
exception, their events are sparsely attended. And when they do
organize, they are often vastly outnumbered by counter-
protesters. Their visibility has decreased since the events in
Charlottesville. Indeed, when I interviewed Richard Spencer for
my book, he admitted that he didn't think anything like the
Unite the Right rally would happen again in the foreseeable
future.
While it's very important to be aware that there is still
hate and violence in this country, some policymakers and media
figures do cite the hate crime statistics that several of the
people to my right talked about as evidence that hate crimes
are certainly definitively rising.
The FBI reported, as you've heard, 7,175 crimes in 2017,
versus 6,121 crimes in 2016, which represents a 17 percent
increase. But it is important to note that nearly 1,000
additional municipalities submitted data to the Federal
Government in 2017. This means the perceived increase in hate
could partly be explained by the fact that we have more data.
As agencies involved in submitting data become more
concerned with hate crimes, more knowledgeable about them, and
more responsible about touting them, the numbers could appear
to be going up. This wouldn't mean that the problem is getting
worse, just that we were vastly undercounting them previously.
Bear in mind that the total number of hate crimes tallied
by the FBI going back to the year 1996 was 8,759 from 11,000
agencies. In 2017, with 16,000 agencies reporting, the total
was actually lower. The overwhelming majority of municipalities
reported zero hate crimes, as you've heard.
Most incidents were classified as anti-Black or anti-
Jewish. Anti-Semitism is a foundational belief of the white
nationalists and of the alt-right. And a recent uptick in anti-
Jewish hate should not be surprising. Even here, though, the
numbers do not necessarily support the idea of what I would
call a full-blown crisis. According even to the ADL's own
research, a 57 percent spike in anti-Semitic incidents took
place in 2017, but this was partly due to a series of bomb
threats made against Jewish institutions by a single troubled
teenager who lived in Israel. Anti-Semitic violence had, in
fact, declined by 47 percent.
And while the following year--the past year has included
some truly despicable acts of anti-Semitic violence,
specifically the horrifying Tree of Life shooting in which a
white nationalist murdered 11 Jewish worshipers, the total
number of anti-Semitic incidents in 2018 was 5 percent lower.
Although violent acts disproportionately draw our
attention, in reality, the alt-right's most prevalent and
widespread form of abuse is online harassment, primarily on
social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Hateful
speech, disturbing though it may be, is in most circumstances,
not all, but most, protected by the First Amendment. And thus,
it is not the government's role to police this behavior, but
rather a decision that rests with the social media companies
themselves.
Law enforcement can and should take seriously--should take
action against threats of violence and of course violent acts
such as those we witnessed in Charlottesville.
My goal in bringing a degree of nuance to these facts and
figures is not to minimize the very real harm extremists have
caused but to discourage the kind of alarmism that can prompt
overreaction on the part of authorities. Law enforcement should
receive the resources they need to combat violence, threats,
and property defacement, whether or not these crimes are
motivated by hate or impugn a specific group.
Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Mr. Soave, thank you very much.
Thank you all for your testimony.
I'm going to begin and do my questions, and then I will
turn it over to Mr. Roy. I think votes are going to be called
in about 10 minutes, so we'll have to break so the members can
go and vote on the floor. We'll come back; we'll resume our
hearing. We'll make sure that all the members who are here have
an opportunity to ask questions.
Let's see. Mr. Ricci, let me start with you.
President Trump was asked if he believes White nationalism
is a rising threat, and he said, ``I don't really. I think it's
a small group of people that have very serious problems.''
The logic of that, essentially, is that this is basically
just a law enforcement problem, and we should put police on it
to go after this small group of troubled people. And that's in
line with what the administration has been doing in terms of
defunding the efforts to try to reach out to people who have
been pulled into extremist White supremacist groups.
I know one group called Life After Hate, which actually
tries to engage with young people who are marginalized and
vulnerable and get drawn into these groups the way that they
might get drawn into a religious cult or something like that.
Do you agree with the President that, one, this is not a
rising threat, and, two, essentially that we should just treat
this as a law enforcement problem and not a question of public
education and prevention?
Mr. Ricci. Thank you for your question.
I obviously think that it is a rising threat against not
only Muslims but also Jews and African Americans and a rising
threat for the country. The characterization of it by President
Trump is one that we do not agree with, but it is something
that we, as a community, are seeing a rise of. As a matter of
fact, there are more attacks and more threats against at least
our community, as borne out by a research study from Pew, than
after 9/11.
Mr. Raskin. Let's see. When there is a violent attack,
something like Charlottesville, the FBI has got two branches
that might be involved: the Counterterrorism Division, which
handles terror, and the Criminal Investigative Division, which
covers hate crimes. So these are two different ways that an
investigation might go.
Mr. German, let me ask you, when there is an incident like
Charlottesville, how does the FBI decide which side of the
house will handle it, the terrorism side or the hate crime
side? And how should that decision be made?
Mr. German. Thank you for the question.
Unfortunately, it seems that they make that decision fairly
arbitrarily. They don't seem to have a strategy that makes it
very clear. There is an older civil rights policy that
suggests, if an agent opens a hate crimes investigation that
has any nexus to a White supremacist group, they should also
open a parallel domestic terrorism case. But I've noted in
recent attacks that the offices and their leadership are very
direct about saying they're opening civil rights investigations
and not calling them terrorism investigations.
So it's unclear whether that policy has changed since it
was published through some ACLU FOIAs several years ago or
whether they are continuing to do that. But it matters very
much, because the scope of a domestic terrorism investigation
is looking for people who either assisted with the attack or
would continue to exist to continue the threat, where a civil
rights hate crime investigation tends to be narrowly focused on
proving the actual crime that occurred.
Mr. Raskin. To followup on that, Mr. Austin, let me ask
you, do you think it is important to label the mass murders
that took place in Charleston or in Pittsburgh at the Tree of
Life synagogue as forms of domestic terrorism? And what effect
should that have on Department of Justice investigation?
Mr. Austin. Thank you.
I think it's important to label it the same across the
board regardless of who the victim is and who the perpetrator
is. I think that you have to have consistent labeling. Whether
you call it domestic terrorism or you call it a hate crime, as
long as you're providing the resources to get the job done, to
determine the perpetrator, to stop the hurt that follows from
it, I think that is the most important thing.
If we are going to give more money to--if it's called
domestic terrorism, then let's call it domestic terrorism. If
we're going to give it--if we call it hate crimes, then let's
call it hate crimes. I don't care what we call it, but we need
to stop it.
Mr. Raskin. Very good.
And, Mr. Selim, let me come to you. On the question of
information-sharing at different levels of government, The New
York Times reported that, when Richard Spencer, whose alt-right
movement sparked the Charlottesville events, was scheduled to
appear in Florida, local police in Gainesville tried to learn
all that they could about the movement, but they were not able
to get anything from the FBI or from the Department of Homeland
Security. It was, as one police lieutenant put it, a Bermuda
Triangle of intelligence.
Why would this be? And does this create a problem?
Mr. Selim. Mr. Chairman, thank you for that question.
Part of the dynamic here that's at play is that a lot of
the issues at play here are, in fact, First Amendment-protected
activity. And ADL continues to be a staunch defender of the
First Amendment. And so law enforcement has many restrictions
at the Federal, State, and local level when it comes to
collecting and retaining information.
That's why nongovernmental organizations like the ADL
continue to lead the way on collecting and retaining this
information and, in many cases, providing it to Federal, State,
and local law enforcement that leads to open investigations and
ultimately successful prosecutions. That's a loophole that I
think needs to get looked at further.
Mr. Raskin. Very good.
Mr. Roy, I'm going to come to you now for your questioning.
Okay. I recognize the gentlewoman from West Virginia for
five minutes.
Mrs. Miller. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you all for being here today.
Mrs. Bro, I am very sorry. My heart, as a mother and
grandmother, goes out to you, as probably everyone in this room
does. We all share you in our prayers.
I agree with my colleagues; we must condemn White
supremacy, hate crimes, and domestic terrorism on every level.
Catastrophic events like what happened at the Boston bombing,
the rally in Charlottesville, the Chabod Synagogue, the Emanuel
AME Church, all of these things are abhorrent to me. There is
no place in our society for such actions. And this isn't just
going on in the United States; this is going on all over the
world.
And I'm going to go out of my comfort zone just a little
bit and probably off topic a little bit, but if you look at
everyone in this room, like I am right now, what a beautiful
composite of human beings. We are all human beings. We may look
a little different. We may have blond hair, black hair, no
hair, curly hair, blue eyes, brown eyes. We are all human
beings. And the moment somebody points a finger at somebody
else, there are four fingers pointing back at yourself. And
that's all I've got to say.
Mr. Selim, how can we--is it possible that we can use data
to equip and empower our State and our local governments to
stop these terrible attacks? Is it possible?
Mr. Selim. Congresswoman, thank you for that question.
It is, in fact, a possibility. But as many of my co-
panelists have noted, the FBI and the Federal Government's own
data is flawed on a number of levels. Making good policy starts
with good data and good information.
It is, in fact, possible to get better policy, better
programmatic results and incentivize and resource State and
local law enforcement better specifically on hate crimes and
bias-based reporting of incidents so it can get better and the
Federal Government can do a better job with incentivizing and
resourcing reporting on hate crimes.
Mrs. Miller. Thank you.
Mr. Soave, can you speak to some of the shortfalls that
you're seeing on the available data for these hate crimes?
Mr. Soave. Sure. As I talked about in my opening remarks
and so many people have noted, the FBI data really is
incomplete and doesn't actually give us a good picture of how
things have changed from one year to another.
I mean, I think it really is the case that, as we become
more aware of hate in our communities, we're paying attention
to it, it's going to be reported, we're having national
conversations about it. I just want to counsel that it could
look like it's getting worse just because we're paying more
attention to it.
Similarly--and maybe I depart from some of the panelists on
this--I'm a little less confident that better data will yield
some positive policy result, because I haven't seen any
evidence or any studies suggesting that the hate crime
designations actually do help law enforcement catch more of
these people or put more of them away or lead to any decrease
in these kinds of crimes.
Again, you know, we're talking about things that are crimes
regardless of whether they're designated as hate crimes. Murder
is illegal. Assaults, property defacement, all of these things
are crimes regardless of whether they're tallied as having
been--the person doing it was doing it for some reason that we
additionally criminalize, if you take my meaning.
Mrs. Miller. And, Mr. Austin, I agree with you. I don't
care what we call it; it's got to stop.
Thank you. I yield back my time.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you.
The gentlelady yields back.
I come now to the gentlewoman from the 12th District of New
York, Mrs. Maloney.
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And, first, thank you, Mrs. Bro, for your very powerful
testimony. I am sorry about the tragedy that brought you here
today, but I hope that your testimony will serve as a wake-up
call to everyone who hears it.
I am interested in hearing from you, Mrs. Bro, about how
your perspective has changed since you lost your daughter. You
have been thrust into the leadership, really, of the fight
against hate crimes in the most tragic of ways. Do you feel
like your insight into the problem of hate crimes has changed
since this tragedy?
Ms. Bro. I don't think that my perspective has changed. I
think that my platform has changed. I was a public school
teacher, working with primarily fourth-and fifth-graders. I
made that a priority in my classroom. I made sure that kids got
to know kids that didn't look like them. I made sure that kids
got to understand how their words had impact on other students.
So, in some ways, my audience is older, my audience is bigger,
but I'm still saying the same things.
I certainly have taken more pains to study, to show myself
approved. I don't believe in BS'ing. I believe in either
speaking truth or don't speak. So I have spent a great deal
more time trying to study what's going on, trying to be aware,
trying to think about it. Frankly, my husband can tell you that
I'm up till midnight and later a lot of nights studying,
learning, researching, thinking about, writing. So, in that
way, my life has changed.
Mrs. Maloney. What would you say to those who may not
understand the scope of the challenge? What would you say to
those members of our society who may not be confronting it with
the same passion and commitment that you have? And they should
have it. What would you say to get them off the sidelines and
into the fight against hate crimes?
Ms. Bro. Well, this is actually what I mainly do in life,
is go around talking to people and saying, you have to step up
and you have to step out.
I say to them, get your head out of the sand. The fact that
you can be unaware is definitely a form of White privilege.
It's the key tenet of White privilege, is that we don't have to
see it. We have to choose to see it. And as long as America
tries to be nonracist, we're not going to accomplish anything.
We have to be anti-racist. We have to step up and be aware of
the problems that are around us.
And when I say ``racist,'' I'm talking about religion, I'm
talking about a variety of differences, sexual preference. But
it encompasses being aware of each other as people, taking time
to listen to one another, taking time to talk to one another,
and actually thinking about what we have in common, finding
points of connection. And from there, we can work through our
differences.
As far as the reporting issue, I think I find myself
somewhere between all of these. Because I know there's an
increased problem. A doctor cannot diagnose a patient without
knowing the full set of symptoms. I don't see how we're
expecting you, as Congress Members, to know how to prescribe
allocations of personnel and money without knowing the full set
of symptoms.
So I think that we have to find some way to get a full look
at this. Is it closer to what the gentleman from Reason
Magazine says, or is it closer to what these other gentlemen
are saying? We don't know.
Mrs. Maloney. And, Mr. Austin, you talked about the need to
get accurate data. And we heard from the Anti-Defamation League
that the numbers are up not only for violence against Jews but
African Americans, LGBTQ community. It's up in my district and,
I assume, all across the country.
What are your recommendations for DHS to collect accurate
data for its enforcement?
Mr. Austin. Yes, and let me just be clear: They definitely
are up. I would disagree with Mr. Soave on this point, because
if you look at the actual numbers of population that is covered
by these law enforcement agencies and you compare that to the
number of hate crimes, year after year going into this
administration, the numbers are clearly up.
As far as recommendations, I mean, the first thing is
Congress can mandate, if you are going to spend Federal dollars
as a law enforcement agency or you're going to get Federal--
you're going to get law enforcement equipment, you must provide
us with good and proper and accurate numbers.
It's not that hard. You tie your funding to so many other
things. Tell them that, on their data, if you want that tank,
then you have to provide us with data telling us how many
people in your community are victims of hate crimes.
Mrs. Maloney. My time is up.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you.
I come now to the gentleman from North Carolina, Mr.
Meadows.
Mr. Meadows. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Ranking Member Roy.
Thank each of you for your testimony.
Mr. Austin, what I would like to do is come back really to
you in terms of these numbers. It seems like that should be a
pretty easy thing to fix. You know, candidly, one thing that
Congress should be able to do is actually get good reporting.
So here's what I would ask from you, Mr. Austin, and you,
Mr. German, if you would, is report back to this committee with
three recommendations of maybe how we--what are the categories
and specifically how we would define those categories.
Because I think, Mr. Austin, in some of your testimony,
where you talked about, well, it could be in domestic terrorism
or in a civil rights case, and yet many--when you go to
classify it in a particular category, it could go in either
one.
So I think if the two of you are willing to do that--I see
Mr. German's shaking his head, nodding, Mr. Austin. And, with
that, we'll look for that information, and I'm going to yield
the balance of my time to Mr. Roy.
Mr. Roy. I thank the gentleman from North Carolina. I would
echo some of the points that he was just making and inquiring
of you, Mr. Austin, Mr. German, and, frankly, all of you who
have expertise in the matter.
And I would add to that, I mean, I could kind of nerd out
on the data side of this, as one of those degrees that I got in
Charlottesville was a master's in management information
systems. I have a degree in finance, an MIS, and somehow I'm
sitting here when I could be out in the marketplace, you know?
But, you know, those are the kinds of things--I think we need
to have that kind of data.
But I would say this. One of the things and the complaints
I hear from local law enforcement in Texas 21, in the Hill
country--Kerrville, Boerne, and Austin-San Antonio--they often
don't even apply for grants anymore because it's too
cumbersome. There's too much stuff, too many hoops to go
through.
And so I do think, at some point--this is just a side note
for another day and another hearing, but on this kind of point,
this is why we run into these kind of hurdles. Like, we kind of
go, ``Oh, why aren't we getting this data?'' Well, he goes,
``There's too much crud for me to go through to do it. I've got
to go do my job.'' So I do think there's some things like that
we need to pay attention to.
But I would ask on that front--and to your point, Mr.
Austin, there's a little bit of disagreement between you and
Mr. Soave about the nature of the increase. And so I would ask
you to maybe expand on that a little bit, and then you respond,
Mr. Soave, obviously, in a civil back-and-forth, to give a
little nature about your views and perspectives on the
increase.
Mr. Austin. So Mr. Soave is right that the number of law
enforcement agencies that participated has grown over time. But
if you look at the next number that the FBI has in its UCR
report, it's the population covered. And if you divide the
number of hate crimes by the population covered, as opposed to
by the number of law enforcement agencies, you will see that
from 2013 to 2017, each and every year, there is actually an
uptick in the number of hate crimes.
And so, you know, by agency reporting--by population, we
are, in fact, seeing an uptick in hate crimes. Now, again----
Mr. Roy. What's the relative level of that uptick?
Mr. Austin. It is--you know, what I found is approximately
about a hundredth of a percent. I mean, it's pretty small. I
mean, but we're talking about a population of 306 million, and
we're talking about a hate crime number that, at least
according to the FBI, is 7,000.
Mr. Roy. So, statistically--and I'm not--I mean, this is
important. And even if it's--look, one is too many, okay? Let's
just start with that, okay? But we all have to allocate
resources and figure out what to do.
And so, on this point, what I'm hearing is it's relatively
flat, then, is what I'm hearing. If you're talking about, like,
a hundredth of a percent, I mean, we're talking about
statistically flat.
Mr. Austin. Statistically flat, but I think you could
probably say the same about all crime. I mean, you know, if
we're talking about numbers of 7,000 to 200,000, we could call
it all statistically flat.
Mr. Roy. Mr. German wants to get in on this, and then, Mr.
Soave, if you'd jump in.
Mr. German?
Mr. German. And I would just say that we're still talking
about a relatively small proportion of police agencies that
actually report hate crimes.
Mr. Roy. Sure.
Mr. German. It's not that the other 87, 88 percent are
reporting no crimes; they're not reporting. That's a very
different thing. As the Justice Department has acknowledged,
just because a region does not send us reports doesn't mean
there aren't crimes happening there that fall under this
category.
Mr. Roy. Mr. Soave, anything to add on this point?
Mr. Soave. Well, I largely agree with the position you were
sort of talked into just there. So there might be a slight
uptick or fluctuation from one year to the next. If you look in
the long term, we're talking about it's up slightly one year,
it's down slightly the next year. You know, these are small
numbers.
And there could've been--you know, the municipalities that
are reporting zero in previous years might have missed crimes
in previous years that they should've reported, and then
previous-year totals would be higher.
The overall crime rate has also, I think, been largely flat
over this later term. But if you go all the way back to, for
instance, I believe 1992 is when you start to see a massive--so
there has been a massive decrease in virtually all--in murder,
assaults from 1992. That was the high point in crime. I believe
something like gun homicide has decreased, like, 50 percent
from 1992 to probably 2010, something like that.
Mr. Roy. So let me ask one more question here in my
remaining portion of this time, to any panelist who wants to
jump in here.
It strikes me--and I'm sure some of my colleagues, maybe
particularly my colleague from Brooklyn, would agree--that one
of the things we see out here online, right, is what we
colloquially refer to as trolls. And I just picture some, you
know, kind of kid sitting in his, you know, parents' basement
just, you know, writing out and spewing out a bunch of hate.
And trying to see how much the social media world is
impacting what we're talking about and how much that is
elevating the heightened, you know, existence of these hate
groups and alt-right groups.
Mr. Soave, do you want to jump in on that? And anybody else
jump in, and then----
Mr. Soave. I would just say on that that perhaps we are
seeing an increase, because these formats for expressing these
views, I mean, literally did not exist if you're going back a
decade previously. There was no Twitter, no Facebook to engage
in the kind of harassment that alt-right people do.
But, of course, we're talking now, in the majority of
cases, about protected speech that the government is rightly
kind of prevented from taking too aggressive steps to stop it.
Mr. German. And I would just add that it's really important
that we be very careful about what we're talking about so that
we're not including somebody saying something you don't like
and equating that with murdering somebody, right?
I think Congress passed a definition of domestic terrorism
that's facially neutral: illegal acts that endanger human life
that are intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian
population. A lot of hate crimes fall into that definition,
particularly the most serious ones that involve acts that are
dangerous to human life. So those are the ones that should be
prioritized at the Federal level.
And the problem is, that's not how the Justice Department
looks at it. You know, there are a number of States that don't
have hate crime laws. There are a number of States that don't
have hate crime laws that prosecutors can effectively put to
use. So just deferring all of these crimes to States and locals
that don't have the tools to address them is part of the
problem, which is why we don't have accurate numbers, because
they don't even have the tools.
Mr. Raskin. Okay. Thank you for that clarifying point.
The gentleman's time has expired.
I'm going to come to the gentleman from Missouri's First
District, Mr. Clay.
Mr. Clay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank the ranking
member, also, for holding this hearing.
You know, following reports that a suspect has been
arrested and charged in connection to three recent church fires
in Louisiana, I will State the obvious: Sinister efforts are
still amiss to create fear, harm, and intimidate African
Americans.
These church arsons resurrect painful memories of historic
attempts to intimidate African Americans by targeting houses of
worship. From the Mother Emanuel nine killed in Charleston to
the four little girls killed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 at
the 16th Street Baptist Church, attacks on the Black church
figure prominently in the efforts by White supremacists to
promote racial violence in this country. I am hopeful that
Federal law enforcement officials will take seriously the hate
and racial animus that caused the targeting of these three
peaceful places of worship.
Mr. Chairman, we can brand someone a terrorist easily when
they have a different skin color or don't speak English or are
from another country. But if it is your mission as a White
nationalist here in America to spread fear, hate, and encourage
the elimination of a particular group of people, then we also
have to call them what they are: domestic terrorists, period.
Additionally, Mr. Chairman, I would like to introduce into
the hearing record a Statement from the Lawyers' Committee for
Civil Rights Under the Law on our hearing topic, confronting
White supremacy.
The Lawyers' Committee is a civil rights organization
founded in 1963. They are not new to the fight against hate and
for racial justice on behalf of African Americans and other
minorities.
Mr. Raskin. Without objection, that will be entered into
the record.
Mr. Clay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And I have a few questions.
Mr. German, do you believe Federal law enforcement dollars
and resources are properly allocated to combat the rise and
resurgence of White supremacy terrorism groups?
Mr. German. No, I don't.
Mr. Clay. And why is that? Is that because of the culture
inside of the FBI or Justice Department?
Mr. German. I think it's a complicated answer, and I think
that that's going to take some real unpacking. But I think it's
a matter of policy.
These policies the Justice Department could change
tomorrow. You know, the idea that they're coming asking for new
authorities is troubling to me, because when I look at how
they're most aggressively using these authorities, it's not to
target White supremacists. And, in fact, they ignore most of
the White supremacist violence. So it's a change in policy that
needs to happen.
Mr. Clay. Right. And it's a culture too, because we know
the history of how they targeted Dr. King, how they also
instituted COINTEL probe and other ways to harass Black people.
Mr. German. And keep in mind, the FBI is still
overwhelmingly White and overwhelmingly male. So you have a
very high percentage of White males who are making these
decisions, both in the investigations and in policy.
Mr. Clay. Thank you for that response.
And, Mr. Austin, do you agree that prosecuting and holding
the perpetrators of racially motivated crimes accountable is
critical to our Nation's efforts to combat the rise of White
nationalist terrorism?
Mr. Austin. I absolutely do.
But I also think that sometimes our criminal justice
solutions, regardless of what area we're talking about, are
inadequate. And we have to start talking about our schools, and
we have to start talking about our other institutions, because
criminal justice alone has not stopped crime.
Mr. Clay. Let me ask Mr. Ricci, do you believe social media
entities are doing enough to police the spread of hateful and
dangerous racist content?
Mr. Ricci. Thank you for the question, Congressman.
I'm not an expert in social media, but I would tell you
there has been an extraordinary increase of hate social media
directed toward the Muslim community as well as the Jewish
community and others.
And it is something that we've got to work with the social
media companies, and I'm proud to say the Muslim Public Affairs
Council is working with the likes of Google and Facebook along
those lines. And so I think, yes, more can be done, more should
be done.
Mr. Clay. And I thank you all for your responses.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. Raskin. Okay. Thank you very much.
And we're going to go quickly to Ms. Wasserman Schultz.
After that, we are going to break.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to begin by just going through, Mr. Selim, the Anti-
Defamation League Center for Extremism audit of anti-Semitic
incidents in 2018, which found that nearly 1,900 reported
incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault occurred
against Jewish Americans just last year. That's the third-
highest number, as I think you mentioned in your testimony, of
anti-Semitic incidents since ADL began tracking anti-Semitic
incidents four decades ago.
Seventy-six verified incidents of anti-Semitism occurred in
my home State of Florida, the majority of those in south
Florida, where I live. In Broward County, my home county,
images of a student at a high school performing the Nazi salute
on a school's Jewish student union sign circulated on Snapchat.
I know the pain of this personally, because Nazi-obsessed
trolls have viciously taunted my own children on social media.
So my question to you, Mr. Selim, is: Do you believe the
administration is taking anti-Semitic threats and incidents,
actually, or any of these types of incidents seriously enough?
And what actions, either legislative or otherwise, does the
Federal Government need to take to seriously address the rise
in anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic incidents, and other bigoted
acts of oppression?
Mr. Selim. Congresswoman, thank you for that question. And
I'm sorry to hear that this has happened to you and your
family, but, unfortunately, you are not alone.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. I know.
Mr. Selim. Communities across the country, families across
the country have been stricken by the scourge of anti-Semitism.
And I can assure you that the team at ADL works daily to try to
address these threats.
So you pointed to some of the statistics. Let me just add
one or two more. Last year, the ADL counted over 1,800 anti-
Semitic incidents across the United States. Those aren't things
that appeared on websites or comments somewhere on a website
somewhere. Those were actual incidents that happened somewhere
in the country.
So when it comes to your question on what more can be done
and who needs to say what, leaders at all levels need to stand
up and speak out much more forcefully on this issue. Anti-
Semitism is not something that's a Democrat or Republican
issue. It's a people issue. It's a human issue. And leaders at
all levels, whether you're the President of the United States
or you're the president of the PTA in the district that you
represent, need to stand up and forcefully speak out against
the scourge of anti-Semitism.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Thank you.
Mr. German, I'm going to skip the preamble, because we've
been through the parade of outrageous, unacceptable violence
that has taken place in this country just very recently.
You wrote in December that Congress has given DOJ officials
plenty of tools to attack far-right violence; they just require
the will to use them. What tools do we have but are not using
but should be using to address White supremacist violence,
especially at places of worship?
Mr. German. So I think it's very important that law
enforcement focus on the acts of violence and the most serious
acts of violence.
I mean, one of the things that doesn't get acknowledged
enough is that Charlottesville was about the seventh or eighth
in a series of violent White supremacist riots that occurred
all across the country involving many of the same people. And
it wasn't until ProPublica actually wrote a story documenting
the travels of one particular group that the FBI finally took
notice and conducted an investigation and indicted eight
individuals. And those individuals remain the only eight
individuals indicted federally from the Charlottesville attack.
So law enforcement for some reason has lost the focus on
these violent actors who should be known. Many of these people
had criminal records.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Exactly.
Mr. German. And why they were able to travel around the
country--and, again, Charlottesville, unfortunately, was not
the last. There continue to be these kind of riots around the
country, often led by people who have long criminal histories
and yet are continuing to act violent.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Thank you.
Just in the remaining time I have, any of you that feel
compelled to answer this question:
We've all spoken today about how our Federal Government
defines and tracks hate crimes and the severe underreporting
that has taken place. My district, for example, includes the
town of Southwest Ranches, which is home to the Sikh Society of
Florida. Sikh members of my community have spoken out about
increasing harassment since 9/11, but crimes against Sikhs were
not counted by the FBI until 2015.
And I want to bring attention to the fact that, in the
ADL's report, 2,040 of the 16,149 reporting agencies, less than
13 percent, reported one or more hate crimes to the FBI. That
means that about 87 percent of all participating police
agencies affirmatively reported zero hate crimes to the FBI.
Ninety-two of those cities, including five in Florida, have a
population over 100,000 people.
And I could go on, but for anyone on the panel, what are
some of the most egregious gaps in how the FBI currently
collects and reports hate crime data that should be immediately
corrected?
Mr. Raskin. And let's just take one answer to that.
Mr. German, were you motioning?
Mr. German. Sure.
So, again, just because an agency isn't reporting doesn't
mean that there aren't hate crimes. In 2000, Northeastern
University did a study and found 5,000 hate crimes that had
been reported internally within State governments but were not
reported to the Federal Government. So it's key to understand
that.
And what the Federal Government can do is follow the Hate
Crime Statistics Act and actually go out and find these crimes
and report them rather than relying on the States to do it.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Thank you.
And before I yield back, Ms. Bro, I just want you to know
and I hope you take at least some comfort in knowing that this
chairman and our majority takes this issue of White supremacy
and the rise of horrific bigotry in this country very seriously
and that we keep your daughter in our heart and our mind every
single day and we fight and will continue to fight in her
memory. And thank you for standing up and being her champion.
Ms. Bro. Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Ms. Wasserman Schultz. And you speak
for all of us there.
What we're going to do now is we're going to have a final
set of questions from Ms. Tlaib from Michigan. And I'm going to
ask my friend Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton to take the
chair. At that point, she will declare the subcommittee in
recess until we finish our voting, and we'll come back. So, if
you don't mind, please, everybody, hang out here, and we have
several more members who are going to continue the questioning.
Ms. Norton?
And I now recognize Ms. Tlaib for five minutes.
Ms. Tlaib. Thank you so much, Chairman.
Ms. Bro, I want to thank you so much for your courage.
Every time you spoke today, I mean, you really are very sincere
and genuine about combating hate in our country, and I
appreciate it, as a mother raising two Muslim boys in this
country. I want you to know I'm going to teach them about your
daughter, Heather. I'm going to talk about her and hopefully
create a legacy of continuing to be able to speak truth to
power, as you said. Thank you so much, again, for your courage.
I want to go ahead and talk about the rise--obviously, the
rise of supremacy. That's why we're here. But we're looking, as
Members of Congress, at the dramatic reduction in resources
that have been designated to address and prevent this.
And this issue hits very close to me. You know, this man,
Nicholas Diedo or something, a White male, recently was charged
with arson and hate crimes in Dearborn Heights in my district
because he targeted Arab-American business owners, continued to
target them. So this is very, very important to me, that my
families at home feel safe in our country.
And so my question is really direct. And, Mr. Selim, I know
that you are very, very intimate in regards to looking at this.
But we saw that DHS reassigned personnel in the Department's
intelligence and analysis unit tasked to tracking and combating
violent White supremacy. The primary purpose of that team was
to share information, as you talked about.
I think you said 71 percent of these White supremacists are
actually successful. Is that correct?
Mr. Selim. The statistic was kind of a two-sided coin in
the sense that, of Islamist-inspired terror attacks, the data
out of University of Michigan said that over 70 percent of them
were interdicted in the planning phase, while, on the White
supremacist side, over 70 percent of them were successful in
committing actual acts of violence.
Ms. Tlaib. Absolutely. And we want to prevent massacres
like the Tree of Life in Pittsburgh and Mother Emanuel Church
in Charleston.
So I'm going to be really frank, and I'm a person--I'm new,
four months here. And I'm going to ask you directly, all of
you, and I want you to answer honestly. Has this administration
blatantly failed to acknowledge the problem of White supremacy
and, in fact, made decisions to cover it up?
Ms. Bro. I will not give you my personal opinion, but I
will tell you what David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Matthew
Heimbach, Jason Kessler have all thanked the current
administration for giving them support, for giving them a
platform that they have been missing for many years.
Mr. Selim. Congresswoman, as you know, I am intimately
familiar with these issues. And the way that I'd answer your
question is that, if you look at the budget requests that have
come to Congress from the Department of Homeland Security over
the course of the past three years, you will see that the
resources dedicated to the point that the chairman made on
community partnerships, on supporting locally based efforts to
prevent and intervene in instances of radicalization and
violence, those budgets and those personnel counts have been
decimated.
And that's what the budget numbers tell. That's not
analysis. That's not opinion. Those are facts.
Mr. German. And I would add that there's also a problem
with the lack of law enforcement around these issues, not just
at the Federal level but at the State and local level. So it's
not just the messaging that's coming down from the White House
but, rather, the fact that there's not response that needs to
happen to make sure that these people know they're not allowed
to come into our communities and cause harm.
Mr. Ricci. Thank you for the question, Congresswoman.
As a Muslim American, I think I can say that, with
President Trump being in office, there is a collective pit
inside the Muslim stomach, meaning that, by what he has said
and what he has done, the promise of America, what it can be,
the experiment of America, what it should be, what we're
heading toward, is something that has caused doubt in the
Muslim mind. Are we going to be able to get there? Are Muslims
going to be part of that equation?
Mr. Austin. Undoubtedly. With the rhetoric, the resources,
there is no doubt that this administration has this completely
backward.
Mr. Soave. I'll just say, I can't speak to the allocation
of law enforcement funding.
I do think there is perhaps too much direct causal blame
being assigned to Trump or the administration for the rise of
the alt-right. There, of course, the alt-right has also talked
about how they hate Trump for some members of his family
marrying Jewish people, I mean, is the kind of insane things
they think.
So I'd be a little bit more cautious. I don't know that
there's good direct evidence that it is fueled by something
Trump has done.
Ms. Tlaib. I'm going to just end with, I understand what
you were trying to say. My whole thing is, I'm saying, has this
administration failed to acknowledge the problem? I'm not
saying--I mean, I'm looking at resources, and, as a Member of
Congress, what do I need to do is get the facts, create the
whole doctor-versus-patient relationship that Ms. Bro was
talking about. And that's what we need to be able to stop the
violent attack on communities of color and various diverse
ethnic and religious backgrounds.
Thank you so much, Chairwoman. I yield the rest of my time.
Ms. Norton.
[Presiding.] Thank you very much for those questions.
I'm going to continue the hearing. And I certainly wouldn't
begin without thanking Ms. Bro, particularly in light of the
tragedy she experienced, for your work now as an emissary for
all of us in a way that will capture the attention of the
American people, as needs be. You are very brave.
My question is about the FBI statistics. I must say that I
am very concerned about the kinds of incidents that get missed.
Now, I understand that in another hearing we're having, we'll
have Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. But I'd be
very interested in, those of you who follow these issues, about
what it means to have perhaps some confusion about what the
statistics now report.
Remember, the FBI is supposed to be the gold standard.
Well, I have some examples here that show that that gold
standard is tattered because of the failure of the FBI to pick
them up.
And, by the way, Mr. Soave, you suggest--and I can
understand that statistically it's not unheard of to suggest
that there may be other reasons why these stats appear to be
going up, as the number rises, that they may have been
underreported, and you suggest other reasons as well. There are
organizations, Mr. Soave, like the ADL, for example, where even
when the numbers are smaller than they are today, would've been
keeping track. So I really do doubt that the failure is to
notice that these statistics were beginning to rise.
I, for example, can point out instances which I was sure
would be in the FBI's data. For example, in Irving, Texas, a
gay high school student was beaten so badly that he had to have
reconstructive surgery--broken teeth, eye socket fractured.
That report wasn't even included in the hate crime statistics
for that year.
Another example. February 2017, in Kansas City, a man--you
would think this would not have been missed--yelled ``get out
of my country'' as he murdered an Indian American man. How
could that have been overlooked as a hate crime?
And, of course, we know that Heather Heyer's murder in
Charlottesville was also omitted from those statistics, as were
the attacks on others on that same day.
Look, some of these were in plain sight, whether or not the
FBI is capturing them.
By the way, Ms. Bro, were you aware that the statistics may
not have captured what happened in Charlottesville?
Ms. Bro. Yes, ma'am, I have been aware of that.
If I may, part of the problem with that is it's simpler for
people to prosecute the actual crime rather than the hate
crime, because with the hate crime you have to go much deeper
and prove the intent. So, many times, law enforcement will
choose to simply prosecute and report the actual crime as a
crime, say, the homicide, vandalism, or whatever, rather than
make the extra----
Ms. Norton. Yes.
Ms. Bro [continuing]. allocations of their own resources--
--
Ms. Norton. And I understand that, Ms. Bro. That's why I
gave you three incidents that nobody could've missed----
Ms. Bro. Right.
Ms. Norton [continuing]. it seems to me, but the FBI did.
And suggesting that even that system--the FBI gold standard
system is deeply flawed.
And here are some other statistics. The FBI reported 6,121
hate crimes in 2016, but the Federal Government's own National
Crime Victimization Survey estimates 200,000 hate crimes each
year, on the average. I must say, I never expected those kinds
of disparities and discrepancies.
Mr. German, what is your understanding of, first, the FBI's
explanation for these deficiencies and any understanding you
have as to how we could have such differences----
Mr. German. Thank you.
Ms. Norton [continuing]. in two official crime statistics?
Mr. German. Exactly. And if you look at the numbers, they
actually track. So we know that, of the 200,000 victim reports
that they say were hate crimes, half of them were not reported,
so we cut down to 100,000. And we know that the FBI's numbers
from the Uniform Crime Reports are actually only 12 percent of
law enforcement agencies reporting. So if you add that other 87
percent, you would create a number that's up around 70,000. So
100,000 to 70,000 then look like numbers that are somewhat more
closely aligned.
But it's the fact that we have this Federal policy of
deferring to State and locals, who don't necessarily have the
tools or the interest in trying them, some for practical
reasons, as Mrs. Bro suggests. Sometimes it's hard to prove
what was in somebody's mind when they committed an act. But we
should still acknowledge that crime for what it is and
prioritize its investigation in a way----
Ms. Norton. You know, there's a difference between
prosecution and acknowledging that----
Mr. German. Exactly.
Ms. Norton [continuing]. an incident has occurred. So the
failure to acknowledge--in fact, I wouldn't put the two in the
same bouquet at all. Because the incidents, the ones I offered,
could not be missed and I don't think were missed, but they
weren't reported. So I do understand what you're saying, Mr.
German.
But, Mr. Austin, I'd be interested in your view,
particularly given the discrepancies I just indicated, what
actual effect on law enforcement--because Ms. Bro made that
distinction--actual effect on law enforcement it has to have
such underreporting by the official agency, the FBI, of the
Federal Government.
Mr. Austin. I mean, I think the effect is that law
enforcement doesn't know what to do with those numbers and
largely just ignores them. I mean, they don't take action.
Where you have something that's telling you that you don't
have a problem, you're not likely to take action to try to
solve that problem. And you're not looking for solutions in the
way that you would look if you actually had good data telling
you: Here's what's happening, here's where it's happening,
here's when it's happening, here are the perpetrators, here are
the victims. Then law enforcement can actually take that data
and do something with it. But when you have silly numbers, you
don't do anything with them.
Ms. Norton. So do you think that not being able to do
anything with them because you don't have accurate numbers
could have an effect on the growth, the increase in hate
crimes?
Mr. Austin. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, if we don't
base it on data and facts, then we're just guessing. Those are
our two options here. And I'd prefer not to keep guessing.
Ms. Norton. Yes.
Yes, Mr. Selim.
Mr. Selim. Madam Chair, if I may just chime in with two
points here, that this is an important conversation about the
quality of data and what the statistics show, but there's also
another very important point that I want to make sure is
introduced as part of this conversation. Hate crimes, by their
definition, are intended to sow fear in the perpetrated, the
victim, and the communities that they represent.
And so Ranking Member Roy made the point earlier, one is
too many. The most important number here really is one. When
individuals, when victims or families of victims are victimized
by hate crimes or hate-related incidents, those tear at the
fabric of the communities that we live and work in on a day-to-
day basis.
And the second point is, as we're wrapping our brains
around how to best address this, it really boils down to two
buckets: training and data. We must make sure that local law
enforcement officials are prepared to identify, report, and
respond to hate crimes. And better data, at the end of the day,
will mean or could mean a better allocation of resources and
prevention strategies. And those two things in combination
ultimately need to be a substantive part of this conversation.
Ms. Norton. Yes.
Well, look, we have a Federal system, and these crimes are
mostly dealt with at the local level. Do we need some way to
get a national reporting system, regardless of whether the
State agencies involved move on it? And if so, how do you think
that should be handled? What should we do to make these
statistics jibe with one another and both help law enforcement
and help the public know what is happening?
Yes, Ms. Bro?
Ms. Bro. I don't think localities are going to be
interested in reporting at all as long as they don't have to,
unless they really need the help with money for prevention.
Because, otherwise, it's not to their advantage to report that
they have a problem. It's to their advantage to look like that
we have no problem here, we're a wonderful place to live, y'all
come.
Ms. Norton. Uh-huh. So you would need a compulsion like a
Federal law that says you must report?
Ms. Bro. But I hate to have an unmandated--I mean, an
unfunded mandate. I can tell you from working in government and
secretarial work and also as a schoolteacher for many years, we
get a lot of those.
We're going to have to probably dangle a carrot of some
sort for localities to even be interested in reporting. If the
Feds are going to take that over, then money is going to have
to be allocated that way. Money is going to have to follow it
one way or the other.
Ms. Norton. But you do agree that we need a uniform system?
Ms. Bro. Well, we need something fixed, because we have a
mess right now.
Ms. Norton. Uh-huh.
All right. The committee will be in recess. And I thank the
witnesses for their patience during this recess on the floor.
Now there's a series of votes, but the full committee will
reconvene shortly.
[Recess.]
Mr. Raskin.
[Presiding.] The subcommittee resumes its proceedings now.
Thank you for your patience for us.
The ranking member of the subcommittee is going to reserve
his time, and I'm going to call on the gentlelady from
Illinois.
And I'm also having to absent myself just to go over to
Judiciary, and I'm going to turn it over to the vice chair of
the committee, the distinguished Representative from the 14th
District of New York, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who will preside.
And I would now recognize Ms. Kelly.
Ms. Kelly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you to our witnesses for this important hearing.
I am troubled by the lackadaisical response of the FBI and
DHS, considering the frequency at which these acts have
occurred in recent months and the threats they obviously
present to Americans.
As we have talked about already, just within the last two
months, there have been several significant crimes based on
race, religion, and ethnicity: the churches, the synagogues,
the two Jewish men attacked in New York City, in Brooklyn, as
the assailants yelled ``we hate Jews.'' A car rammed into a
group of eight people crossing at an intersection in Sunnyvale,
California. They were intentionally targeted based on their
race and the belief they were of the Muslim faith. The response
to each of these horrific acts seems little better than, ``Let
us get back to you on that.''
Mr. German, as you are aware--are you aware of any other
similar delays, where an immediate threat has been identified,
yet the issue isn't being addressed because the office hasn't
been organized?
Mr. German. It's hard to tell why there's a lack of
attention to this. And I think if you look at these underserved
communities, whether it's Native Americans, whether it's
migrants, whether it's LGBT communities, that a lot of the
violence against them somehow falls into an accountability
void.
And I think it's very important that Congress compel the
FBI to take the Hate Crime Statistics Act seriously and go out
and collect this data. They know how many bank robberies happen
in every FBI field office's territory. How is it they don't
know how many violent crimes against people of color and other
communities are occurring? It's something that they should have
available to them.
Ms. Kelly. Thank you.
While I understand the need for a structural approach to
this problem, the administration needs to have a short-term
plan, one that will serve to protect those from these acts of
terrorism now. We don't have any time to waste.
Mr. Selim, based on your experience, what steps could the
FBI and DHS take in the interim to address this threat?
And before you answer the question, I wanted to let you
know I'm a diversity trainer and first trained by the Anti-
Defamation League.
Mr. Selim. Oh, great. Thank you for offering that.
And in my role overseeing all our national programs, it's
so important to note that, as we talk about addressing the root
causes of not just anti-Semitism but all forms of bias,
bigotry, and intolerance, it's so important to note that this
work where we're talking about hate crimes, we're talking about
adults, but our work and the work that I have the privilege to
oversee in K through 12 classrooms and with teachers across the
United States is really addressing this at the earliest
possible stage. And there's really no greater thing that can be
done when we're talking about prevention.
Congresswoman, when it comes to your question on what more
can be done, I've outlined a number of things in my written
Statement. I'll offer two specific comments here to be brief.
First is the resources that we've continued to talk about,
when it comes to analytics, when it comes to analyses on these
issues, and when it comes to publicly available reports by the
Federal Government, irrespective of the department or agency,
on the threat of White supremacist violence not just made
available to the American public but to State and local law
enforcement across the country.
The second is, I am not aware in this administration of an
overarching policy to specifically address these issues. It's
been addressed in the National Counterterrorism Strategy as a
priority, but the resources and the actionable policy that need
to follow those notations have not been made.
Ms. Kelly. So you feel that that's a role, really, Congress
can play, actually, is making sure they have the adequate
resources to deal with this problem.
Mr. Selim. And the mandate to create the policy that will
direct its programs.
Ms. Kelly. Okay.
Anybody else have anything to say about that?
Mr. German. I would just add that they need to have a
strategy, right? I mean, right now, everything is arbitrary. A
crime that occurs in one district is ignored in a different
district. Rather than understanding that, okay, we have States
that aren't stepping up and enforcing the law in these areas,
so let's put resources there--there are States that don't have
hate crime laws. Let's put these resources in those areas that
aren't getting served to make sure that at least the Federal
Government is acknowledging that these crimes are occurring
when the State government isn't.
Ms. Kelly. Okay.
Mr. Austin, what impact does a delay in immediately
addressing this threat have on communities most affected by
these acts?
Mr. Austin. I think you have fear. These communities are
worried. These communities, their children are worried. The
parishioners are worried. That prevents people from going out
and enjoying their communities and spending time with their
communities and participating.
When you don't address these problems--and this is what we
saw in this space and why it was so important to involve the
communities, is that you're turning kids against the
government. They're going to do things because they learn their
lessons based on how they're treated. So every day that we kind
of sit around and allow the White supremacy to flourish, we're
hurting our young people. And, you know, these are going to be
problems that we're going to have to deal with later.
Ms. Kelly. When I listen to you speak, it reminds me, I
represent--my district is in the Chicagoland area. And what
you're saying is what our kids that are in the gun violence
space, what they face every day. And if you don't--it's like,
if you don't do anything, the trauma that comes along with that
and growing up with that.
Thank you both.
While we certainly need to look for long-term solutions, we
can't afford to wait to address the issue now. People are
dying. I expect to hear from the FBI and DHS next month
precisely what they are doing in the short term to address this
frightening rise in hate violence.
And I yield back the balance of my time.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
[Presiding.] Thank you.
The ranking member and the chair reserve their time, and
the chair now recognizes the gentlelady from Massachusetts, Ms.
Pressley.
Ms. Pressley. Thank you, Madam Chair.
There is not a single doubt in my mind that the growing
number of hate crimes taking place in this country are a
byproduct of the hateful rhetoric being spewed regularly by the
current occupant of our White House.
This administration has emboldened White nationalism, White
supremacy, and far-right extremism, including anti-Semitism and
Islamophobia, all while suggesting these groups do not present
a growing threat to our communities and national security. We
know otherwise, and the witness testimony we've heard today is
further proof that this is not the case.
I want to thank the witnesses for being with us today. And
I want to extend my deepest condolences to Mrs. Bro and the
countless other families who have lost loved ones due to
intolerance, hate, and bigotry.
Mrs. Bro, your courage to come before us today and to stand
up for what is right is a testament to the love that guided
Heather's life in her quest for racial and social justice.
Although there is no hierarchy of hurt, throughout our
Nation's history, hate crimes have disproportionately impacted
the Black community. Since 1995, Black Americans have been
victims of 66 percent of all racially motivated hate crimes.
The numbers don't lie: Black Americans continue to find
themselves at the greatest risk.
This year marks 400 years since the first African slaves
arrived on the shores of Jamestown in the hull of ships, robbed
of their freedom, culture, and humanity. Racism against Black
Americans is entrenched in the enslavement of our African
ancestors and has manifested in our Nation's institutions and
policies.
And despite the progress we've made as a country, Black
Americans are still treated as second-class citizens,
disproportionately targeted for driving while Black, walking
while Black, lunching while Black, organizing while Black,
literally existing while Black.
In 2017, an FBI intelligence assessment leaked,
identifying, quote/unquote, ``Black identity extremists'' as a
prime threat to law enforcement officers. To be clear here, the
FBI was tracking peaceful protesters while advising local law
enforcement agencies that these groups were a violent threat.
This is the same agency that secretly spied on Dr. King and
civil rights activists for their pursuit of equality for Black
Americans--a movement that at the time, if we're telling the
truth, was vilified and yet today we celebrate.
Mr. Austin or German, yes or no, since I have limited time,
do you believe that so-called Black identity extremists are a
significant threat to law enforcement? Yes or no?
Mr. Austin. The name ``BIE'' is a made-up term that is
reckless and that is something that is simply going to continue
the problems that we are seeing right now, where 1,000 people
die at the hands of law enforcement every year. It should've
never been put out, it should've never been given to State and
local, it should've never been done.
Mr. German. And I agree with that Statement.
Ms. Pressley. Okay. So, again, for the record, do you
believe that so-called Black identity extremists are a
significant threat to law enforcement?
Mr. German. No, I don't believe there's a such thing.
Ms. Pressley. Thank you.
Mr. German, are you aware of any data that would justify
the FBI's focus on that issue or surveillance of groups like
Black Lives Matter?
Mr. German. No, not data that would justify that. I don't
believe there is data that would justify that kind of
surveillance.
Ms. Pressley. Are you aware of the agency's use of face
recognition technology to survey and target groups like Black
Lives Matter?
Mr. German. I am aware that facial recognition technology
is being used in law enforcement broadly and by the FBI as
well.
Ms. Pressley. And at a time when Black Americans are three
times more likely to be killed by police, a document like the
FBI's intelligence assessment is not just misleading, it is
reckless and dangerous.
Mr. German, what do you see as the danger posed by the
FBI's messaging on so-called Black identity extremists?
Mr. German. Well, if you look at that intelligence
assessment, it has a lot of information very poorly analyzed,
putting things that are not related together in a way that
poses a scary message to law enforcement without any advice
about what to do about it. So all that they can do is be afraid
that Black activists pose a threat to them.
So when any kind of group goes out to engage in its First
Amendment rights, the way the police are going to respond to
them is as if they are a physical threat to law enforcement.
And that can be very dangerous.
Ms. Pressley. All right.
And since I'm running out of time, Madam Chair, I ask
unanimous consent to include a Statement for the record from
Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block, director of Bend the Arc: Jewish
Action.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Without objection, so ordered.
Ms. Pressley. Thank you.
One of Heather's last Facebook posts shared was, and I
quote, ``If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention,''
unquote. I hope this conversation sparks the outrage that we
need to finally shed light on the evils of White nationalism
and far-right extremism and invokes the will and the courage to
tackle it head-on.
Thank you, and I yield.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you.
I will now recognize myself for five minutes of
questioning.
Ms. Bro, I want to take the time to truly thank you for
coming in today. And for so many of us, with the most painful
moments in our entire lives, it's--we all deal with it in
different ways. And for so many people, we need to internalize
that and try to move on and bury that pain. And I just want to
commend you for being willing to relive this moment in order to
enact change in our country in recognizing the danger of White
supremacy. So I just want to take that moment to recognize you
and your heroism here today.
Ms. Bro. Thank you so much.
And I would like it, as part of the record, Stated that
Heather was killed primarily because Mr. Fields was aiming to
kill someone who he thought was Black. He drove into a crowd to
kill people in support of Black Lives Matter.
I have been given a huge platform across the country, in
some forums even around the world, because I'm White. And many
Black parents lose their children, many Muslim parents lose
their children, Jewish parents lose their children, and nobody
pays attention. And because we have this myth of the sacredness
of the White female, I've been given a platform.
So I'm going to use that platform to keep drawing attention
back to where the issues are.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you, Ms. Bro.
And I'm moved in hearing you speak about these issues so
eloquently. And in your experience in living through this
country and recognizing the privilege that you have, what was
that process like for you? How did you come to be able to
articulate these points? How did you see it? How did you
experience it? And how do you educate others?
Ms. Bro. Always with the mindset of a teacher. I believe in
learning what I need to learn and then putting it back out as
simply and straightforward as possible for the listener. I am
still doing that.
I find a lot of people have no clue of the privilege that
they have nor how they should be using that privilege. As I
mentioned before, many people think being nonracist is okay and
that's enough to solve our country's problems. And, instead, we
need to be actively anti-racist.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. What is the distinction between being
nonracist and anti-racist?
Ms. Bro. Nonracist is saying, ``I don't recognize anybody's
color. I think that we're all equal and we all be treated
fairly.'' And that's kind, to a point. I understand what
they're trying to say, and it comes from a place of good
intention.
However, we need to recognize our differences, and we need
to rejoice in our differences. America is stronger for all of
our differences brought together. And we need to accept that
and go out of our way to stand up against racism when we see
it. To be anti-racist means to take an active stance of ``I am
not going to tolerate that in my presence.''
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ms. Bro.
Ms. Bro. Thank you.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Mr. Ricci, the San Bernardino attack of
December 2, 2015, was labeled as a domestic terrorist incident.
Is that correct?
Mr. Ricci. I believe so.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Mr. Austin, do you know, the June 12,
2016, Pulse nightclub shooting was also labeled as a domestic
terrorist incident, correct?
Mr. Austin. That's my understanding.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Mr. Selim, when Dylann Roof, a 21-year-
old White supremacist, entered the Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church and murdered nine African American worshipers,
was that labeled as an incident of domestic terrorism?
Mr. Selim. I don't believe that it was. But there's no
question that it was.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. So in your belief as a leader in this
space, it was an incident of domestic terrorism but it was not
labeled as such?
Mr. Selim. That's correct.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Was the White supremacist shooting at
Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue labeled as a domestic
terrorist incident?
Mr. Selim. I'm not aware that it was, although then-
Attorney General Sessions came out and called it that. But the
charges that have been brought to bear and are currently
playing out in court are not ones of terrorism.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. So, despite all of that rhetoric that we
were hearing, they weren't actually labeled--these White
supremacist incidents were not labeled as domestic terrorist
incidents.
And, you know, I really dug into some of these
distinctions, what was labeled as domestic terrorism, what was
labeled as a hate crime. And I could not help but--as much as I
tried to dig in and explain, I could not help but feel and see
that attacks committed by Muslim Americans were almost
automatically labeled as domestic terrorist incidents, yet
White supremacist shooting after shooting after shooting is
not.
And I can't help but come to the conclusion that these
labels--what's being labeled as terrorism is almost exclusively
coming down to the identity. And it seems as though White men
invoking White supremacy and engaging in mass shootings are
almost immune from being labeled domestic terrorists in their
violence.
Do you find similar patterns, Mr. Selim?
Mr. Selim. I think when we look at--and I'll just call it
what it is--the terrorism that has been perpetrated against not
just Jewish communities but against Muslim communities, against
Christian communities in Charleston, against Sikh communities
in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and a range of other communities that
organize based on race, national origin, ethnicity, color, et
cetera, like, these acts that take lives, I don't know how you
can label these actions in the eyes of the victims or the
families or the communities that are affected anything other
than acts of terrorism.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you. Thank you very much.
And one last line of questioning.
Mr. German, in your 16-year career as an FBI special agent,
you spent a great deal of time undercover in White supremacist
organizations. Is that correct?
Mr. German. Yes.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And what were some of the impacts or
effects that you saw, if any, with some of these groups that
were not being recognized as White supremacist groups, some
violence or acts you see committed, that they kind of get off
without being labeled as White supremacist incidents? Does that
affect the dynamic of those groups? Does it embolden them? What
did you see?
Mr. German. It certainly emboldens them, and it deprives
law enforcement of crucial intelligence.
There was one particular group that, when we started
engaging with them, they were bragging about certain bombings
they had committed, and we struggled to try to find evidence
that those bombings actually occurred. And it turned out they
had all been treated as vandalism.
Fortunately, nobody had been physically hurt in those
bombings, but it was a progression toward a more violent plan.
And had there been more focus on actually identifying these
incidents and calling them what they are, I think that could
have been interdicted much sooner.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. All right.
The chair will now recognize the gentleman from Texas, Mr.
Roy, for five minutes.
Mr. Roy. I thank the chairwoman.
And, again, thank you all for your continued patience as we
go through voting. And it makes for a long afternoon, so thank
you all for doing that.
A couple of quick questions. We've had a lot of great back-
and-forth today and, I think, some helpful information. I know
we have some assignments on trying to figure out how we can
improve some of the data collection. I know that my colleague
from North Carolina threw some of that out. I would agree.
And would ask, by the way, in those recommendations,
particularly those with expertise, Mr. Austin, Mr. German, and
others, I think Mr. Selim as well, about how we can encourage
local law enforcement to participate when we know the burdens
on local law enforcement. So, you know, that's a difficult
question, right? I mean, we've run into some of that.
An observation, though, just to make some clarity--and I
alluded to this in my opening Statement--about why we have the
issues we have with respect to domestic terrorism versus how we
approach international terrorism, and then how we deal with the
branches of international terrorism we have in the United
States. In other words, these are distinct things for distinct
reasons.
And so one of the questions I want to point out, I mean,
you look at--there's a Forbes article talking about deadliest
terrorist groups in the world today. Of the 18,814 deaths
caused by terrorists around the world last year, well over half
are due to the actions of just four groups: the Islamic State,
the Taliban, Al Shabaab, and Boko Haram.
And we can go around and we can go through a bunch of data
on that, and that's not really the purpose of this hearing, so
I don't want to digress, except to say that's a real issue that
we've been confronting, you know, for the better part of 20
years. And many of you, or at least several of you, have been a
part of that. And thank you for dealing with that.
But we deal with, for example, the Islamic State in
America. Like, it's a real thing. We have to deal with it. It's
not a prejudicial thing to recognize the reach of the Islamic
State in America. I've got data here that says 182 individuals
have been charged in the United States with offenses related to
the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, since the first
arrest in March 2014. And it goes through, and we could--again,
we could go through that data.
But would you agree, Mr. German, for example, that that is
a problem and that that is a distinction worth making, with
respect to how we deal with domestic terrorism or what we label
as domestic terrorism, in light of what I mentioned earlier?
American citizens don't really want to be surveilled. We've
got our own issues right now trying to figure out how to
conduct surveillance on foreign nationals when it then impedes
and then overlaps with American citizens. And that's a very
real concern. And I know that would be a bipartisan share of a
concern about how we deal with that.
And so these things are real. Could you comment on that
just for a little bit? And then I want to go to another
question.
Mr. German. Sure. You know, part of the problem is we
create these categories to organize our response to particular
kinds of violence----
Mr. Roy. Sure.
Mr. German [continuing]. but those categories don't
accurately describe what's going on.
And I think the New Zealand attack showed many people for
the first time that this is not a--you know, Naziism wasn't
invented in the United States of America, and it isn't confined
to the United States of America. It's always been a broad,
international phenomenon.
So, you know, part of it is making sure that our laws are
designed to focus on the most violent actors and to focus
there. And where we see problems is where we start to go beyond
the people who are actually committing violence and try to
silence entire communities or engage in surveillance activities
of----
Mr. Roy. Sure.
Mr. German [continuing]. people who are not directly
involved in committing violent acts.
Mr. Roy. And the only I would add to that is that I agree
with, I think, a comment I think it was Mr. Austin made--it
might have been Mr. Ricci; I think it was Mr. Austin--that
whatever you label it, whatever you call it, hate crime,
domestic terrorism, whatever, let's just get the bad guys,
right? Let's just stop what's happening.
And so that is what would be my calling here to do, is
whatever we need to do, tools-, resources-wise, to have a
collective effort between state, local, and Federal to
accomplish the goal, I think there is universal agreement that
we want to accomplish that objective.
And let me move on because I have one minute left, and I
know everybody has been here a long time. I would actually,
without objection, ask to insert that into the record.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Without objection, so ordered.
Mr. Roy. Thank you, Chairwoman.
Mr. Soave, just a question here. I just want to ask this
hypothetical. Assuming a broad view of what would constitute,
for example, a hate crime or a perspective on anti-Semitism--
and it's one of the things we've been focusing on a lot here
today, for good reason. If a, you know, White individual or
somebody that was part of White groups, alt-right groups, one
of these hate groups we've been talking about, for good reason,
some similar group, were to come forward and describe and
suggest that, for example, that, due to a view of history, that
a particular group of people were helpful to Jews looking to
reclaim their home in Israel, while purposely ignoring that
group's coordination with Nazis to actually harm Jews or block
their move to Israel, would that be anti-Semitism for purposes
of classifying one of these White supremacy groups who are so
often Holocaust deniers or anti-Jewish?
Mr. Soave. Yes, I would think so. I mean, what you're
alluding to, I think, is a truth that anti-Semitism is
certainly not confined to the right or the alt-right. There has
been anti-Semitism on the left as well. We often see this on
college campuses.
Now we're not talking about hate crimes; we're talking
about speech. And, again, I urge the government to take the
most, you know, cautious approach possible, and I think you----
Mr. Roy. Agreed.
Mr. Soave [continuing]. agree as well.
Mr. Roy. Agreed.
Mr. Soave. But it is true, for instance, university
campuses report bias incidents. Again, these things are not--
they provide a facility, a means for students and professors
and administrators to report things that are not crimes but
that makes people uncomfortable for some reason. And certainly
there are incidents there that have been classified as anti-
Semitic that are coming from a different ideological direction.
Mr. Roy. I appreciate that. Thank you.
No more questions.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you so much.
The chair now recognizes Mr. Gomez.
Mr. Gomez. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Before I start, I want to acknowledge Susan Bro for just
being here and sharing your story and the story of your
daughter, Heather Heyer. She was an inspiration because she was
fighting for all of us when she was down in Charlottesville. So
thank you so much.
I want to draw your attention to the TV screen. This is a
glimpse of, I believe, what is Trump's America for people who
look like me. And I would like to share some of these few
hateful comments I receive on a weekly basis.
Post one says: Go back home and quit destroying my country.
Post two says: Little prick Jimmy Gomez, more than likely
another anchor baby.
Post three says: Were you even born here? If not, you
should not be in office. But it would explain why you do not
value America or American citizens, you piece of--fill in the
rest.
These are just a few of the hundreds of messages I receive
on a weekly basis on Facebook, Twitter, through email. They're
hateful, they're racist, and they're meant to marginalize the
community that I represent and the communities like mine.
They also echo the President's sentiments, embody his
policies, and also reflect a dangerous desire for White
nationalism and also embody the philosophy of White supremacy.
And the only thing I find more disgusting than this hateful
speech is the public figures who endorse it, the silence of the
leaders who normalize it, and the cowardice of those who fail
to condemn it.
And we know that the facts are on our side, that the hate
crimes are on the rise, and more than half of the 4,100 hate
crimes are perpetrated by far-right extremists that occurred in
2017. We know the facts. White supremacist attacks are on the
rise. White nationalists are mobilizing like never before, and
they are finding a safe haven on social media platforms.
But I also want to point out another fact: that hate also
sometimes leads to policy, and policy sometimes reinforces that
hate, as well as the rhetoric of our President.
I want to enter into the record an article from The
Washington Post that says, ``Trump sees immigrants as invaders.
White nationalist terrorists do too.''
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Without objection, so ordered.
Mr. Gomez. I found this article interesting because it also
states: ``From the January 2017 mass murder of 6 Canadian
Muslims at a Quebec City mosque to the mass murder of 11 Jewish
congregants at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, there was
one theme that tied together all of the terrorists in these
cases: The suspected gunmen in all these attacks saw immigrants
as invaders of their countries.''
Mr. Selim, as well as Mr. George, can you talk about the
connection between White supremacists and White supremacy
ideology and anti-immigrant rhetoric?
Mr. Selim. Congressman, thank you for that question.
So White supremacist world view or White supremacist
philosophy is often rooted in a number of core pillars. Anti-
immigrant, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and a number of other kind
of hateful and bigoted ideologies are part of what make up the
notion that the White race, quote/unquote, is under attack and
shrinking and action needs to be taken more immediately.
We've seen these patterns and trends. If you look at the
manifesto of the Poway shooter and you look at what he wrote on
these issues, if you look at the comments written that were
publicized and brought out in many media reports after innocent
Muslims were killed worshipping in a mosque in New Zealand,
there is a direct correlation between xenophobic actions and
ideologies and those that are executed--violent actions that
are executed at the hands of White supremacists.
Mr. Ricci. If I may jump in, Congressman----
Mr. Gomez. Yep.
Mr. Ricci [continuing]. the reality is that the statistics
that we've talked about that are so poorly collected or poorly
tracked, they are not, certainly, going to track the fact that
I get a text message every time an occurrence like this happens
from a worried parent or from a worried constituent. They are
not going to track the fact that a parent will be concerned
about their child going to school tomorrow in fear of being
attacked. They will not track the fact that immigrants to this
country who believe in what this country's promise is, that
that dream of what America is is somehow now tarnished.
And the work that we're doing here, the policies that we're
creating, that we're talking about creating, and the statistics
that we're talking about tracking, all of the good work that
we're doing can be wiped out in a tweet. It can be wiped out in
a tweet.
Mr. Gomez. Thank you.
I know I'm out of time. And I don't want people to walk
away thinking I'm saying all immigration policy is meant to
implement a White supremacist agenda. That's what I don't want
people to walk away with. But the negative rhetoric that's
backed up by policy, if the motivation is racist, then that
policy can be skewed and not based on facts.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you.
As we wrap up today's hearing, I want to thank each and
every one of you as witnesses.
This hearing is the first in a three-part series on how we
are going to approach policy changes to ensure that White
supremacy is acknowledged in our law enforcement procedures. As
a result, in our next hearing, we will be having the FBI and
the Department of Homeland Security representatives and
witnesses from those two agencies come in.
And, you know, one of questions that we just have, briefly,
as we close out today, is--I'm interested in hearing from each
of you, if there is one question that you think needs to be
asked of either the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security
going into our second hearing, what should that question be?
What should the question be that we are asking in our second
panel?
So I'll start, perhaps, with Ms. Bro.
Ms. Bro. First off, let me state that there is an act under
consideration right now named after two young people who died
as a result of hate crime. The Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer
Hate Crime Reporting Act is something that you should consider.
What I would ask of the FBI is: Why? What is your reason
for what has been termed a lackadaisical attitude? Why are you
not fulfilling that dream of being the gold standard? Why are
you allowing your edges to become tattered?
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you.
Mr. Selim?
Mr. Selim. On the legislative side, I want to echo Ms.
Bro's point. The act has--I think it's--I don't know if it's
out of committee yet, but--has been referred to as the NO HATE
Act as well.
This is a concrete legislative action that can be taken
that the Congress should strongly consider and I would urge
this committee to consider as well, in addition to
Representative Schneider and Senator Durbin's work on the
Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. Those are two things that
the Congress can look at and take immediate steps on.
When it comes to asking questions to departments and
agencies--Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the
FBI, specifically on DHS--why was there a reduction in dollars
and personnel working on terrorism prevention, and what is
being done instead of that?
I think it's as simple as that. And we'd be happy to work
with you and other committee staff to unpack those numbers and
understand what that means.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you very much.
Mr. German?
Mr. German. My question would focus on information that was
requested in the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act that was
introduced in 2017. And very specific information would have
been requested--or was requested through that act that is still
in process: looking on one side of the ledger, about the number
of attacks broken down by each category the domestic terrorism
program was divided to; and then on the other side of the
ledger, the resources devoted to the investigation of those
particular groups.
And the FBI has recently reorganized its categorization to
change those significantly. And what I would ask is whether
they ran those numbers when they saw the act and whether those
numbers had an impact on whether they decided to change them,
to hide the disparity in that.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you, Mr. German.
Mr. Ricci?
Mr. Ricci. Congresswoman, I would say that we should ask
the FBI and our Federal agencies, are we truly engaged, are
they truly engaged with the communities that that he serve? Do
they understand those communities? Do they understand what is
motivating them, what their fears are, where they come from?
That lack of understanding maybe breeds a lack of approach.
And in service to those communities, I think it would be much
more--it would be better if they did engage, if they did engage
at a much more substantial level.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you.
Mr. Austin?
Mr. Austin. Yes. I would ask them, if you claim to be an
evidence-based organization, why won't you actually start
gathering good evidence and stop wasting your resources on
vilifying people who are rightfully concerned with excessive
use of force by law enforcement?
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you.
And Mr. Soave?
Mr. Soave. Sure. I will just say, you know, I would hope
that, when you speak to the law enforcement, FBI, you know,
keeping in mind that this is a civil rights but also civil
liberties subcommittee, you know, bringing up--I appreciate
some of the things Representative Pressley talked about, about
how law enforcement has in the past surveilled activists of
color, things of that nature, all Americans. So that when we
talk to the FBI, we make sure they're keeping in mind, you
know, what are we going to do to combat some of this hate, but
with keeping in mind the civil liberty rights that all people,
even very vile people, have to express their views as long as
it's not violence they're engaged in.
Thank you.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you very much.
I'd like to thank all of our witnesses for testifying
today. This is an extraordinarily difficult subject to broach
in broader conversation. It raises questions of what is White
supremacy, what is anti-Semitism, what is anti-Black racism,
what is Islamaphobia. And those conversation are hard to have.
And I commend each and every one of you for the role that you
are playing in making sure that we move forward as a country.
Without objection, all members will have five legislative
days within which to submit additional written questions for
the witnesses to the chair, which will be forwarded to the
witnesses for their response. I ask our witnesses to please
respond as promptly to any written requests as you are able.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. This hearing is now adjourned. Thank you
very much.
[Whereupon, at 5:03 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
[all]