WASHINGTON (CN) --- Attorney General Merrick Garland released an executive memo on Tuesday announcing a 30-day internal review of how the Justice Department handles hate crime incidents. It was his first memo to the staff since he was confirmed to the seat on March 10.
The review will examine how the department tracks and prosecutes hate crimes in order to determine ways to bolster their defense against the incidents.
The announcement came within hours after a 65-year-old Asian-American woman was attacked in Manhattan. Authorities are currently investigating it as a hate crime. Garland noted in the memo that hate crimes against Asian-Americans was on the rise: The nonprofit Stop AAPI Hate recorded over 3,800 racist incidents against the group since the pandemic began, and a mass shooter killed six Asian-American women less than two weeks before.
In the memo, Garland said that hate crimes had a “toxic effect” on American society. He intends on improving hate-crime data collection and expand the scope of the department’s monitoring system to include acts of bias that don’t necessarily fit under the definition of a hate crime.
Hate crimes in the U.S. surged in recent years. In November, the FBI released a report finding that incidents that qualify as hate crimes rose by 20% during the Trump administration, and 2019 saw the highest they’d risen in more than a decade.
There were 7,314 hate crimes in 2019, according to the report, with 51 murders falling under the umbrella. Many hate crimes are never even reported.
There was also a surge in white supremacist propaganda in 2020, according to a March report from the Anti-Defamation League. There were 5,125 cases of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ and similar messages dispersed throughout the year, nearly double the instances reported in 2019.
The review will be overseen by Acting Deputy Attorney General John Garlin while the department awaits the confirmation hearings of Lisa Monaco, a domestic terrorism expert, and Vanita Gupta, a civil rights attorney, to the number two and three positions in the agency.
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