Time for Congress to take action on hate crimes bill Murray Lee
May 10, 2021
A bipartisan group of elected officials in Congress introduced legislation on April 8 designed to help fight back against hate crimes across the country. It’s not hard to understand why. Hate crimes are up – in Washington state and around the country. Just last month, the King County Prosecutors Office filed its tenth hate crime case this year targeting local Asian Americans. In February, a synagogue in Spokane was spray painted with swastikas, and last week, a neo-Nazi pleaded guilty in federal court in Seattle to threatening local Jewish activists and journalists. This problem is real, it’s current, and it has gotten worse since the start of the pandemic.