Austin council moves to create hate crimes task force, evaluate existing anti-hate program

AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Thursday, Austin City Council approved a resolution that would create a city-led hate crimes task force and re-evaluate an anti-hate program created by the city in 2023.

"It's going to be a better avenue to get data, I think it's going to be a better avenue to report a hate crime, and you don't directly have to go through APD," Austin City Council Member Zo Qadri said. He authored the resolution.

According to council documents, the resolution passed Thursday will kickstart some anti-hate initiatives, including:

• Create a hate crimes task force run by the city of Austin's Office of Equity and Inclusion instead of being "an external partnership"
• Craft a hate crimes web portal, which would give information on how to report hate crimes and services for people who have been victims (many of these resources are already available on the city's We All Belong website. We'll get to that in a minute)
• Create a notification program that informs elected officials of violent hate crime incidents and determinations made by the APD Hate Crimes Review Committee
• And launch programs like New York City's "Breaking Bread" program, which brings people from different communities together "to build intercultural understanding," according to council documents

"Just having these like community sessions where folks can come and talk to various stakeholders and groups, that's what I'm really excited about, just the transparency of it all," Qadri said.

According to council documents, the Travis County District Attorney also created a Hate Crimes Task Force in December 2010, which included members from school districts, city councils and other organizations. The focus of that task force was the "No Place for Hate" initiative within schools. It came to be after several high-profile hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community, according to Qadri.

"They've done a great job, but with an increase of hate throughout the country, throughout the state, throughout the city, I really think it's important for the city to take an ownership and make sure that the tools and resources are there for our constituents," Qadri said.

The city of Austin also launched an anti-hate campaign in 2023 called the "We All Belong" campaign. Thursday's resolutions direct the city manager to pause that program to look at its efficacy and how it may be looped into this new initiative.

"I have tried to rely on the We All Belong dashboard for understanding trends in hate crimes across Austin for some time now," Austin City Council Member Marc Duchen posted on the city council message board. "I was excited the other day when I noticed that the data set had been updated after what seemed to be over a year without updates. However...I reviewed the data found on the We All Belong dashboard and saw that totals don't appear to match up with the APD hate crime data set."

Because of those discrepancies, the resolution asked the city manager to "pause the previous programmatic functions of the We All Belong campaign for one year to revise budget priorities to shift away from its event focus toward data-driven programs and services model," the resolution said.

"We really think now is the time to step up, like I said, when we have a state and federal government who just refuse to do so," Qadri said.