Fay Stetz News Today

With hate crimes rising in Oregon, the Department of Justice has launched a campaign to support minority communities and spread awareness of the state’s nonemergency hotline for reporting bias and hate crimes. The campaign, dubbed “You belong,” will run for three months and include six public service announcements and ads in English, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, […] The post With surge in hate crimes, Oregon justice department launches hotline awareness campaign appeare...

A new campaign from the Oregon Department of Justice aims to bring awareness to the state's Bias Response Hotline amid a surge in bias and hate crimes and incidents, officials said.

Bias and hate incident reports in Oregon have surged by 178% since 2020, according to the state Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Unit. In 2019, Oregon lawmakers passed Senate Bill 577. The measure called on ODOJ to establish a non-emergency hotline for residents who wanted to report bias crimes to trauma-informed operators rather than law enforcement. SB 577 also required the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission to release data on the reported incidents on July 1 every year.

(The Center Square) - The Oregon Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Unit recently released its annual Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) report and found that bias-related complaints are becoming more common.

Hate crimes include vandalism, assault, threats of “imminent” serious injury and “offensive” contact motivated by bigotry.

Whether to charge suspects with hate crimes rests precariously on individual prosecutors’ varying interpretations of the law.

Oregon’s Bias Response Hotline connects residents with trauma-informed advocates trained in crisis intervention.

The number of reported hate and bias crimes since 2020 has decreased in some counties and leapt much higher in others, according to officials.