MIAMI– Univision News, the award-winning news division of Univision Communications, Inc. (UCI), the leading media company serving Hispanic America, announces its participation in “Documenting Hate,” a nationwide coalition of diverse news organizations initiated by the independent nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica with the purpose of creating the most authoritative national database of hate crimes and bias incidents ever assembled in the United States. Other partners to date include The Google News Lab, the New York Times Opinion Section, WNYC, The Root, Latino USA, First Draft, FUSION, Meedan, New America Media, Ushahidi, Buzzfeed News, The Advocate, and the University of Miami School of Communication. The coalition is also working with civil rights groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, The Human Rights Campaign, and the Anti-Defamation League. Launching today, the project can be viewed in English at Documenting Hate and in Spanish at El Reporte del Odio.
The “Documenting Hate” initiative will assemble a trove of data from law enforcement, community groups, nonprofit organizations, news reports, social media, and directly from victims and witnesses. ProPublica reporters and a volunteer network, including journalism students throughout the country, will authenticate reports and then disseminate them to local media partners and other groups across the nation through a secure website. “Documenting Hate” also aims to gather information on incidents of harassment and intimidation – both in the digital realm and the material world – that may not rise to the level of a criminal offense and are currently not documented and analyzed by any government agency.
“We are extremely proud to be a part of the Documenting Hate coalition and its efforts to help shine a light on the issue of hate crime in our country,” said Borja Echevarría, Editor-in-Chief, Univision News Digital. “With access to the wealth of reliable information that this unprecedented database will provide, journalists will have a clearer view of the problem, based on facts, which will undoubtedly result in more accurate, data-driven, and sensitive reporting. We commend ProPublica for launching this initiative.”
“The need for real data has never been more acute,” said Scott Klein, ProPublica Deputy Managing Editor. “Experts who have studied hate for decades tell us they’ve noticed an uptick in hate crimes since the presidential election, and what data there is has confirmed those hunches. But with thousands of police departments failing to report alleged or even confirmed hate crimes to the federal government, we lack foundational information about how many of these crimes occur in any given year, the nature of crimes and bias incidents, and what works to discourage them. The Documenting Hate project seeks to support citizens and lawmakers with reliable data to help understand the problem, and to encourage local reporting to make the problem hard to ignore.”
Federal law requires the FBI to request hate crime statistics from state and local law enforcement agencies. However, thousands of those state and local agencies do not comply. As a result, while the FBI tracks between 5 and 10 thousand hate crimes a year, an annual survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates there may be as many as a quarter of a million.
For the collective gathering of hate crime related data, “Documenting Hate” will use techniques developed for ProPublica’s collaborative Electionland project last year, in which Univision News also participated as a media partner.