Data from the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission’s 2024 Bias Crimes Annual Report reveals the hotline has continued to receive a large number of reports of bias-motivated acts toward Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino community members. That’s just one of several key takeaways from the report, which came out in July. The Source also reported on the key takeaways from the 2023 Bias Crime Annual Report.
In 2019, Senate Bill 577 was passed by the legislature, requiring the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission to review all bias crime and non-criminal bias incident data per Section 9 of the bill. The bill also requires the commission to wrap these results into a report annually, this report being its sixth.
Heightened hotline reports from Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino individuals
While month-to-month data wasn’t available to the Source in order to protect the privacy of users of the hotline, data from the 2024 report shows that Black/AA and Hispanic/Latino residents were victims of bias-motivated acts in greater quantities than other racial demographics.
Bias crimes, as opposed to bias incidents, are acts motivated by hatred towards one’s perceived protected class and are considered crimes by law, whereas the term “bias incident” isn’t considered a crime by law. The term “bias-motivated” is overarching, referring to both bias crimes and bias incidents. The data from this report solely refers to its first section, recording reports to the hotline.
In 2024, 1134 reporters to the hotline didn’t identify their race.
Additionally, not everyone who reports to the hotline is the victim of the bias-motivated act. Almost two-thirds of the reports from 2020 until 2024 were made by people other than the victim. These reporters could be witnesses and school officials, for example, who may not know about the victim’s demographic information.
Looking ahead to the 2025 Bias Crimes Annual Report, scholar of race and ethnic relations at Oregon State University Dwaine Plaza predicts that attacks on Hispanic and Latino individuals may continue to go underreported, as they have in past years. The 2024 report and reports before it explain that “underreporting is extensive.”
Especially for undocumented Hispanic and Latino community members, Plaza added that a state agency-instituted hotline is likely not the place victims can turn to.
He said under the Trump administration, the scapegoating towards Latino individuals has and likely will continue to embolden people to perform bias-motivated attacks.
The increase in reports to the hotline from Hispanic and Latino community members started increasing in 2022. This heightened number of reports could also be tied to the new movement of this group to Oregon, Plaza said.
“Latinos are a new group, in a sense, in Oregon,” Plaza said. “So that makes the Latino population in Oregon much more visible and much more vulnerable in many respects…”
Hotline usage drops by 7%
Since its conception in 2020, the statewide Bias Response Hotline has never seen a drop in service like it did this past year. This decline in hotline usage is what Attorney General Dan Rayfield called, “a sobering gut check and a call to action,” in a news release.
This drop in reports is due to Oregonians retreating into silence, he added, concluding that the hotline needs to continue to build trust and execute its intended purpose.
“The hotline exists for them,” Rayfield said.
Plaza said Hispanic and Latino individuals who may report to the hotline are likely from middle-class communities, those who are college educated and have “lived in the system for a long time.”
This past year, reports were in higher numbers in counties that may encompass urban areas. For example, Multnomah County had 819 reports of bias-motivated instances to the Bias Response Hotline. The report details that Deschutes, Lane, Marion, Washington, Clackamas, Benton and Columbia County each received more than 100 reports to the hotline.Law enforcement officials reporting to the hotline also decreased this year. Although law enforcement officials are not required by law to report to the hotline, this drop in reports is revealing of a potential lack of capacity in smaller, more rural agencies to report to the Bias Response Hotline.
Reports of bias motivated acts have spiked on the internet via cell phone
Across all settings where bias-motivated acts have most commonly occurred, these reports have decreased in every setting — excluding instances via cell phones and the internet and school settings.
Plaza said this could indicate animus acts are being conducted by people who know the victim. And, the data does point to this idea.
Victims are increasingly being targeted by members of their own community
Victims of bias-motivated attacks have been targeted by people in their community in greater numbers, according to the report. Prior to 2024, attacks were in large part executed by strangers. Specifically, according to the report, individuals were seen to be targeted by their neighbors or a community member in heightened numbers. This year, 21% of bias motivated acts were committed by one’s neighbor or community member, marking the greatest number of neighbors or community members that have been perpetrators of bias motivated attacks in the hotline’s five-year existence.
Hotline staff have been increasingly targeted in this year’s report
Hotline staff are required to document every report to the hotline — even the reports they receive that may be targeting their own perceived protected class. This year, there were 244 bias incidents reported where a hotline advocate was targeted.
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