Pink poodle

Two men were walking their pink-dyed poodle Beauty in Hillsboro when a motorist rolled down his window and shouted anti-gay slurs at the couple. George Allen Mason Jr. , 23, was accused of assaulting one of the men as he repeatedly shouted homophobic remarks at the pair. He pleaded guilty to the assault and was sentenced to three years in prison.

(David Beltier)

In March 2013, David Beltier and his boyfriend were on an afternoon walk with their standard poodle, Beauty, in Hillsboro. Beauty's fur had been dyed a light pink color, and a few passers-by already had made derogatory remarks.

Then a man yelling gay slurs out the window of an SUV made a U-turn, headed straight for Beltier and his boyfriend.

"I knew something bad was going to happen," he said.

The assailant punched Beltier, then grabbed a metal tool from his SUV and hit Beltier in the head. The man later pleaded guilty to an assault charge.

Yet when the FBI published its annual tally of hate crimes nationally, the attack on Beltier was not included.

Hillsboro is one of nearly 2,800 city police and county sheriff's departments across the country that did not submit a single hate crime report for the FBI's annual crime tally during the past six years, an investigation by The Associated Press found. That's about 17 percent of all city and county law enforcement agencies nationwide.

Advocates worry that the lack of a comprehensive, annual accounting disguises the extent of bias crimes at a time of heightened racial, religious and ethnic tensions. The nation was stunned last June when nine black parishioners were shot dead at a Charleston, South Carolina, church, in an attack labeled a hate crime, and community groups have reported a notable increase in violence against Muslims and mosques in the wake of last year's terror acts in Paris and San Bernardino, California. Gay and transgender people also are regular targets.

A better accounting of hate crimes, the FBI and other proponents say, would not only increase awareness but also boost efforts to combat such crimes with more resources for law enforcement training and community outreach.

"We need the reporting to happen," said the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of Atlanta's historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King preached. "Without a diagnosis, we don't know how serious the illness is. And without a diagnosis, there is no prescription. And without a prescription, there is no healing."

In Hillsboro, Beltier to this day avoids walking in the dark and hates to be alone, although he takes comfort from the bystanders who stopped to help him and tracked down his assailant. He feels grateful to the police -- but also he wants to know that future hate crimes will be reported.

"The community needs to be aware that this is happening in their own town," he said. "It will give everyone the chance to help fix it and bring a better future."

The findings

The AP examined FBI hate crime reports for the years 2009 through 2014 and matched those against lists of every city and county law enforcement agency in each state, obtained separately from all 50 states.

The vast majority of the departments that did not file any reports represented small towns, often consisting of just a few thousand residents or less. But a number of larger cities with a history of racial troubles also were missing, including Birmingham, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The statistics revealed wide disparities in how seriously states take the reporting. Nationwide, there were 16 states in which more than 25 percent of local law enforcement agencies did not appear at all in the FBI hate crime database between 2009 and 2014. That included 64 percent of agencies in Mississippi and 59 percent in Louisiana.

Oregon ranked in the middle, with 12 percent of agencies not reporting at all. But more than 100 Oregon agencies did not file a report in at least one year over the six-year period.

Some agencies, like Hillsboro, said they thought they were reporting, even though they were not, and some thought they didn't have to file reports because they hadn't investigated any hate crimes. The Washington County Sheriff's Office fell into that category.

Other agencies that oversee jails might have assumed they were exempt because they don't patrol the streets, but the FBI encourages reporting by all law enforcement agencies whose officers are empowered to make arrests. Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, whose primary responsibility is running jails, did not file a single report in the six-year period.

Hillsboro Police Lt. Michael Rouches blamed the reporting lapse on a technical problem between his department and the state. He said it was discovered last year when the department was in the process of applying for a grant and noticed the data was missing.

The lack of reporting should not suggest the department didn't aggressively investigate what happened to Beltier and his boyfriend, Rouches said.

"We ran with it as soon as we got it, and we got to the bottom of it," he said.

Hillsboro's internal tallies show the city has had 11 hate crimes since 2010, none since the attack on Beltier, Rouches said.

For other agencies, the Oregon State Police was the bottleneck on hate crimes reporting.

The state is supposed to submit reports to the FBI on behalf of Oregon's law enforcement agencies. But in 2014, the Oregon State Police did not send the FBI hate crimes data from every agency that submitted it.

Why? Dave Piercy, Criminal Justice Information Systems manager for the state police, said the head of the agency's crime statistics team retired that year. Remaining staff knew how to handle one of two common data formats submitted by local police, but not the other.

Agencies whose data consequently didn't go to the FBI in 2014 include some of the state's largest - Portland Police Bureau, Washington County Sheriff's Office and the police departments in Gresham and Beaverton. Piercy said the reports would be submitted to the FBI near the beginning of this month.

"Far from complete"

Between 5,000 and 7,000 hate crime incidents are catalogued each year in the FBI report, with nearly half of all victims in recent years targeted because of their race.

The FBI defines a hate crime as a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity." Filing reports for the federal count is voluntary and guidelines call for reports to be submitted even if they list zero hate crimes, a signal to both the FBI and the community that local departments are taking such crimes seriously.

FBI Director James Comey has called on all agencies to do a more aggressive job tracking hate crimes, and also has initiated training sessions on bias attacks for hundreds of law enforcement officers nationwide.

"It is the most important data collection initiative, but it is far from complete," Michael Lieberman, the Washington counsel for the Anti-Defamation League, said of the FBI's survey.

The ADL has launched a "50 States Against Hate" campaign that includes improved data collection by law enforcement as a top priority, and also is seeking passage of hate crime laws in the five states that do not have them: Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Wyoming.

Lieberman, who worked with the FBI and others on updating the agency's hate crimes training manual published last year, said law enforcement agencies must neutralize the issues that can lead to non-reporting, such as departments fearing negative publicity and victims who may not trust the police.

"If these crimes are never really counted, it's a way of saying they are not important," said Mark Potok with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups in the U.S. "For many black people, it's another form of being victimized. It's a way of saying your life doesn't matter."

The AP's analysis determined that some states clearly make reporting a priority. For example, Washington has a law that makes collecting data on hate crimes mandatory. And, Washington makes prompt reporting of crime statistics a condition for funding opportunities and accreditation. Only one agency in the state - Uniontown Police Department -- consistently failed to report hate crimes information over the six-year period

In two of the nation's most populous and diverse states, California and Florida, compliance also is nearly universal.

The AP's analysis found signs that the FBI's efforts to step up reporting could be starting to pay off. In 2014, about 200 local law enforcement agencies that had not reported in the previous five-year period submitted information to the FBI.

"We must continue to impress upon our state and local colleagues in every jurisdiction the need to track and report hate crime," Comey, the agency's director, said in a speech that year. "It is not something we can ignore or sweep under the rug."

Struggle for progress

The case of Barbara Hicks Collins in Bogalusa, La., illustrates the work that remains to be done.

A knock on the door, strong and quick, jolted Hicks Collins awake one night in 2012. Someone must be in trouble, she thought. She flung open her front door to the shocking sight of her car engulfed in flames.

Investigators later determined someone had deliberately set fire to her Mercedes and also tried to burn down the one-story brick house she shared with her mother in this eastern Louisiana town, once known as a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity. Hicks Collins, a black woman, had no doubt the fire -- set on Martin Luther King Jr. Day-- was racially motivated. Her father had been a prominent civil rights leader who filed lawsuits that desegregated local schools and forced police to protect protesters, and her family remained active in the community.

Despite the circumstances, the case didn't make it into the FBI hate crimes report. Neither the police department nor the local sheriff has filed a hate crime report with the FBI since at least 2009.

In response to an inquiry about Hicks Collins' case, officials with both the Bogalusa Police and the Washington Parish Sheriff's Department said they did not know hate crime information was not being reported and blamed clerical errors.

Four years later, no arrests have been made in the attack on her house and the state fire marshal's office, which ultimately conducted the investigation, said it was unable to determine whether the setting of the fires constituted a hate crime or not.

Under FBI guidelines, an incident should be reported as a suspected hate crime if a "reasonable and prudent" person would conclude a crime was motivated by bias. Among the criteria for evaluation is whether an incident coincided with a significant holiday or date, specifically citing the King holiday. A suspect need not be identified to meet the threshold for reporting.

For Hicks Collins, the failure to count the 2012 attack as a hate crime is a painful reminder of the continuing struggle for racial progress.

"The more things change," she said, "the more they remain the same."

Oregon agencies missing at least one hate crimes report

-- The Oregonian's Carli Brosseau and Dave Cansler contributed to this report.