Justice Department Awards Nearly $30M to Combat the Rise of Hate and Bias Crimes

These awards will help communities improve the investigation and prosecution of hate and bias crimes, solve hate crime cold cases, serve victims of these offenses, and support related research.

The funding was announced at the inaugural hate crimes grantee conference organized by OJP’s Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). The grants are part of the Justice Department’s wide-ranging efforts to improve community safety, serve victims of crime, support America’s youth, advance science, and promote equal justice. OJP is the largest grantmaking component of the Department and houses its criminal and juvenile justice-related science and statistical units.

The funding includes:

• $12 million in grants under BJA’s Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Program to help local law enforcement agencies and prosecutors’ offices investigate and prosecute hate and bias crimes, as well as collaborate with community partners on outreach and education to targeted communities.
• More than $7.6 million in awards from BJA to 11 different community-based organizations and civil rights organizations for projects around the country dedicated to developing and implementing comprehensive hate crimes prevention and response strategies.
• $1 million for the Orleans Parish, Louisiana, District Attorney’s Office under BJA’s Emmett Till Cold Case Investigation and Prosecution Program to provide resources in cold case homicide cases involving civil rights violations that occurred before 1980.
• $2.7 million for RTI International and its subrecipients, the Eradicate Hate Global Summit and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, to launch BJA’s new Coordinated Hate Crimes Resource Center.
• $1.125 million for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office through the Office for Victims of Crime’s Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act State-Run Hate Crime Reporting Hotlines program.
• $2.5 million through Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act funding for the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ research and analysis project on National Incident-Based Reporting System data and hate crime reporting patterns.
• $2.5 million in funding from the National Institute of Justice for three research projects on responding to hate crimes with specialized law enforcement units, including LGTBQI+ liaison units to respond to hate crimes against transgender individuals, and addressing the needs of survivors of hate crimes and their communities.

In addition to these new grant awards, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Mizer announced OJP’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Youth Hate Crimes and Identity-Based Bullying Prevention Curriculum to provide resources to address hate crimes, bias incidents and identity-based bullying among youth. The curriculum is designed for middle and high school-aged youth and the teachers, counselors and others who work with them. He also announced the Community Oriented Policing Services (the COPS Office) is launching a new training on investigating hate crimes, which builds on the training the COPS Office released in 2022 on recognizing and reporting hate crimes.