One early February morning in 2009, Fayetteville police officers responded to reports of a fight at the Sunrise Cafe and found two men who had been hit in the face.
Bobby Hilton and Jordan Morris had been sitting in the diner with four friends when four men sitting to their left began “giving them trouble,” making comments about their sexuality, according to a police report.
The fight started when Morris shoved a chair out of his way one of the antagonists had pushed into his path. One man stood up and punched Hilton in the face. Another man kicked Morris in the face when Morris fell down during the scuffle, the police report said.
The case stands out in Arkansas as one of the few labeled as a hate crime and reported as such to the FBI.
Arkansas has no specific hate-crime law, but many law enforcement agencies report such crimes to the federal agency.
The FBI asks law enforcement agencies to voluntarily report hate crimes annually, even if the number is zero, so the agency can fulfill its obligation under the 1990 Hate Crimes Statistics Act to compile a national report of those crimes each year.
The FBI defines a hate crime as any offense committed because of bias related to a person’s race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.
About 32 percent [125] of Arkansas’ 390 law enforcement agencies did not report hate crimes between 2009 and 2014, according to an Associated Press analysis of FBI data.
Fifty-five agencies have reported hate crimes sporadically, the AP analysis shows.
That makes Arkansas the state with the ninth-lowest reporting record, according to the AP data.
Nationally, about 17 percent of all city and county law enforcement agencies — almost 2,800 police departments and sheriff’s offices — haven’t submitted even one hate-crime report for the FBI’s annual tally of crime in the United States, according to the AP.
None of Hawaii’s four law enforcement agencies, for example, reported any hate crimes to the FBI in the six years analyzed by the AP.
All law enforcement agencies in Tennessee and Nevada reported hate crimes to the FBI every year since 2009, the AP analysis shows.
The AP analysis excluded schools, tribal agencies, state agencies, airport police and park police.
In 2014, a total of eight hate crimes were reported to the FBI by 99 Arkansas law enforcement agencies, according the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report.
Four states — Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Alaska and Wyoming — reported lower numbers than Arkansas.
But advocates and researchers say many hate crimes go unreported or unrecognized for various reasons.
Many hate crimes may go unreported because there are no state laws defining or outlawing hate crime in Arkansas, said Mindy Bradley, a University of Arkansas professor who studies the subject.
Arkansas is one of five states that does not have hatecrime statutes or a statute that requires law enforcement agencies to report these types of crimes.
Bradley attributes the lack of state legislation on hate crimes to Arkansas’ political shift to the right and to a scarcity of high-profile crimes in the state.
A law requiring officers to report these crimes would be beneficial “to be able to truly monitor where we are on a spectrum of social justice,” which would help focus efforts to help alleviate these occurrences, she said.
“The real level of hate crime in America is probably 25 to 40 times higher than FBI statistics suggest,” said Mark Potuk, a senior fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based nonprofit group that says it works to protect civil rights and expose hate groups.
In 2014, the FBI reported a national total of 5,479 hate crimes.
If Potuk’s estimates are accurate, this would put the actual number between 136,975 and 219,160 nationally.
The FBI began investigating hate crimes, rather than leaving it entirely up to local agencies, in 1964 after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the murder of three civil-rights activists, according to the FBI website.
The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 gave the FBI more authority to investigate violent hate crimes and prosecute their perpetrators, and expanded the umbrella of protection to a wider group of victims.
Arkansas saw the first person convicted under this act in 2011 when a Green Forest man pleaded guilty to one count of committing a federal hate crime and one count of conspiring to commit a federal hate crime.
Sean Popejoy, 19, threatened to hurt five Mexican men who pulled into a gas station early one morning. When they left, he and a friend followed them in a pickup. Popejoy then leaned out the passenger window and continued to threaten the men, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release.
He also waved a tire wrench at the men and yelled racial slurs, according to the news release.
The driver of the pickup then rammed the victims’ car, causing it to cross the centerline, go off the road and crash into a tree. The car caught fire, according to the news release.
All five in the car were injured, with one suffering life-threatening injuries, according to the news release.
In 2011, the FBI again used its authority to investigate a potential hate crime in Arkansas when a transgender woman was found dead in a ditch in Forrest City.
Marcel Cameo Tye, 25, had been shot in the head and dragged more than 100 feet underneath a car. She had burns on her body from the car’s muffler.
Now, the FBI office in Little Rock is joining a national effort to encourage more reporting by reaching out to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, said Deb Green, a public affairs specialist for the FBI office in Arkansas.
Many of the nonreporting agencies are in small cities, including six police departments in Northwest Arkansas. Local nonreporting police departments were Bethel Heights, Elm Springs, Goshen, Johnson, Sulphur Springs and Tonitown, according to the AP analysis. Departments in Bentonville, Springdale and Elkins didn’t file a report one year between 2009-14.
Police chiefs in Tontitown and Bethel Heights said no hate crimes occurred in their towns last year.
Tontitown Police Chief Joey McCormick said he has been so busy he hasn’t been able to send the department’s information to the FBI.
“I’ve been here since 2013, and we haven’t had one [hate crime] since I’ve been here,” said Bethel Heights Police Chief Rick Moore.
Detective Rich Duncan of the Johnson Police Department said no hate crimes occurred in his city in 2015, but there was one incident in the past six years.
He said there was a confrontation between two people at a gas station and racially offensive language was used during the argument. Duncan said the police report was written up as harassment and after being reviewed by the Arkansas Crime Information Center was upheld as harassment.
The Arkansas Crime Information Center provides information technology services to law enforcement and criminal justice agencies, and manages the criminal justice data system.
Many crimes that may have started because of bias are labeled as aggravated assault or murder because officers aren’t trained to recognize them as hate crimes or because the district attorney for a region chooses not to prosecute hate crimes, Potuk said.
Public colleges and universities weren’t included in the AP data, but institutions of higher education consistently report hate crimes because a federal law called the Clery Act requires that they report all campus-related crimes.
Since 2009, four hate crimes have been reported at the University of Arkansas, the state’s largest public university. Three stemmed from racial bias, and one involved the victim’s ethnicity and/or religion, according to reports required under the Clery Act.
Officers with law enforcement agencies that report hate crimes every year, such as Rogers and Fayetteville, said hate crimes are hard to prove.
“Since there are no hate crime statutes at the state level, it’s very important to work with federal authorities investigating these types of cases,” said Rogers Police Chief Hayes Minor.
Minor said local agencies can assist in initiating an investigation but many times find themselves only being able to address federal hate crimes with state misdemeanor statutes like harassment or criminal mischief.
“The federal system has much stiffer penalties that not only punish the offender with harsher penalties, they also serve as a deterrent to anyone contemplating similar behavior in the future,” Minor said.
Sgt. Craig Stout, an officer in the Fayetteville Police Department, said most years Fayetteville reports zero hate crimes to the FBI, but when it does the cases are scrutinized very heavily by administration.
The fight in the Sunset Cafe represents the one exception since 2009.
“Sometimes it’s clear-cut, sometimes it’s not,” Bradley said.
Hicham Raache and Tracy Neal of the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette contributed to this story.