Buffalo and Laguna Woods are reeling after recent racially-motivated shootings. Here's why it's difficult to prosecute hate crimes.

• A recent increase in racially- and politically-motivated mass shootings across the US target vulnerable communities.
• Despite a surge in hate crimes, only a small percentage are prosecuted as such.
• Under-reported data and reluctance to investigate incidents make it hard to prosecute hate crimes.

People across the US are reeling after a weekend of mass shootings, provoking questions about whether the attacks will be prosecuted as hate crimes.

Last week, Dallas police said they believed a shooting at a Korean hair salon was linked to two other attacks at Asian-owned businesses.

On Saturday, an 18-year-old white man shot and killed ten people at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. 

Another shooting at a California church on Sunday targeted a Taiwanese congregation, an act that officials believe was a "politically motivated hate incident."

Hate crimes are crimes motivated by bias on the basis of race, color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or disability. An increasingly stratified political and social media landscape and backlash against marginalized communities has led to a surge in hate crimes in recent years: The number of hate crime incidents reported in 2020 rose to their highest levels in nearly two decades, the FBI reported. Over 60% of those crimes were motivated by race, ethnicity, and ancestry.

But experts say it's difficult to prosecute hate crimes. Only 17% of hate crime suspects investigated by US attorneys were prosecuted from 2005 to 2019, according to a US Justice Department report last year.

"Many cases are not successful because you have to prove explicit, biased motivation. Proving a level of animus is separate from the crime itself," Stanley Mark, an attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said.

Hate crimes are under-reported.

The first national law addressing hate crimes was the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, which was the result of sustained campaigns by victim advocacy groups, according to Jeannine Bell, a criminal law professor at the Maurer School of Law.

The bill requires the government to collect data on crimes committed because of the victim's identity. Since 1992, the Justice Department has published annual reports on these statistics.

Now, 47 states have hate crime laws, which Bell said is important since most crimes are punished on a state level.

But more than a third of those states don't require data collection on these incidents, leading to underreporting that could result in unequal protections for vulnerable communities.

Nearly half of all hate crime incidents aren't reported to the police, the Justice Department reported. That number is even higher in targeted communities, since many victims don't report their experiences out of distrust or fear of persecution, said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Authorities aren't investigating enough incidents as hate crimes, experts say.

Another reason why hate crimes are hard to prosecute is a lack of full investigation by local law enforcement. Police departments will only report bias-motivated crimes to the FBI if there was an investigation that concluded a hate crime took place.

More than 80% of crimes aren't investigated by the police because many are actually lower-level crimes, like verbal threats to commit a crime, Bell, the professor at the Maurer School of Law, said.

In other instances, police and prosecutors are often reluctant to designate incidents as hate crimes. After last week's shooting at the Dallas hair salon, police initially said they didn't believe it to be "hate motivated," reversing course a few days later after they discovered evidence that suggested the shooting may not have been an isolated incident.

"You need to investigate hate crimes as hate crimes," Bell said. "If you see a difference in the perpetrator and victim's identity, or the perpetrator was targeting several victims of the same background, you need to investigate it as a hate crime."