Governor Signs Historic Bill Aimed at Addressing Hate Crimes for People with Disabilities

By Greg deGiere, Civil Rights Advocate, The Arc of California

Last week, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a groundbreaking bill aimed at curbing and responding to hate crimes, sponsored by a large, diverse statewide coalition led by the Arc-UCP.

As the leader of Assembly Bill 449’s sponsoring coalition, we were able to include extensive instructions to police on recognizing almost universally overlooked anti-disability crimes, which we call the invisible hate crimes.

Assemblymember Phil Ting carried the bill for us and our partners, persisting and escalating his efforts after the predecessor bill was gutted in the final committee last year, forcing him to drop that bill.

ABOUT AB 449:

• Every law enforcement officer in the state –- from CHP officers to local park rangers –- will be required to know and follow a policy spelled out in law detailing how they must recognize, report, and respond to hate crimes.
• Every law enforcement agency must adopt the policy by July 1, 2024.
• To ensure accountability, all law enforcement agencies must submit their policies to the Department of Justice to be checked for compliance with the law –- and for compliance with the model policy developed by the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, in consultation with subject-matter experts such as us. We’ll have an opportunity to ask the commission to strengthen the policy further without more legislation.

State law says that any crime, including disability abuse or neglect, becomes a hate crime when committed because of one of seven protected characteristics of the victim. (Counterintuitively, a “hate crime” need not be motivated by hate, just by bias.) One of those seven protected characteristics is “disability.”

In determining whether a crime is a suspected hate crime requiring further investigation, every officer now will be required to look for indicators of special importance to people with disabilities:

“Hatred, animosity, discriminatory selection of victims, resentment, revulsion, contempt, unreasonable fear, paranoia, callousness, thrill-seeking, desire for social dominance, desire for social bonding with those of one’s ‘own kind,’ or a perception of the vulnerability of the victim due to the victim being perceived as being weak, worthless, or fair game because of a protected characteristic, including, but not limited to, disability or gender.”

Anti-female and anti-transgender crimes, like anti-disability crimes, are especially under-reported hate crimes.

Indicators of suspected anti-disability hate crimes that require further investigation:

• “In recognizing suspected disability-bias hate crimes, the policy shall instruct officers to consider whether there is any indication that the perpetrator was motivated by hostility or other bias, occasioned by factors such as, but not limited to, dislike of persons who arouse fear or guilt, a perception that persons with disabilities are inferior and therefore ‘deserving victims,’ a fear of persons whose visible traits are perceived as being disturbing to others, or resentment of those who need, demand, or receive alternative educational, physical, or social accommodations.”
• “In recognizing suspected disability-bias hate crimes, the policy also shall instruct officers to consider whether there is any indication that the perpetrator perceived the victim as vulnerable and, if so, if this perception is grounded, in whole or in part, in anti-disability bias. This includes but is not limited to a perpetrator targeting a person with a particular perceived disability while avoiding other vulnerable-appearing persons such as intoxicated persons or persons with perceived disabilities different than those of the victim, those circumstances could be evidence that the perpetrator’s motivations included bias against persons with the perceived disability of the victim and that the crime must be reported as a suspected hate crime and not a mere crime of opportunity.”

History of AB 449:

After years of sponsoring and passing bills making important but small incremental progress, in 2015 we led a group of civil rights organizations seeking a comprehensive performance audit of how well California protects people from hate crimes. In 2017, we succeeded in getting the Legislature to order the audit by the State Auditor.

The auditor’s 2018 hard-hitting report found that “law enforcement has not adequately identified, reported, or responded to hate crimes.”

The audit led the Department of Justice to refocus its hate crime leadership, but that left a need for legislative action. In 2019, we started drafting a sweeping bill and organizing a larger coalition to support it, but were hampered by the COVID-19 epidemic and by the Legislature’s complex politics.

In 2022, Assemblymember Ting introduced AB 1947 and shepparded it through the legislative process until the Senate Appropriations Committee gutted it, forcing him to drop it. We tried again with AB 449 this year, meeting the objections to last year’s bill, which was signed into law last week.

There’s follow-up work to be done, so we will keep you posted on progress.