An Uber driver was sitting in his car near Coors Field waiting for a rider when the racist harassment started.
It was 10:50 p.m. on July 25 — the Rockies had just defeated the Houston Astros — when the stranger started yelling racial slurs at the black driver and threatening him.
“I kill people like you,” the man yelled, according to a police report about the incident.
When the Uber driver got out of his car to yell back, the harasser punched him in the face and choked him. The driver broke free, got back in his car and called 911. Police arrested the alleged assailant, Carter Manning, and he faces three misdemeanor charges, including one of a bias-motivated crime.
But if Manning’s case goes like other similar crimes in Denver, he likely will never be convicted of the bias-motivated charges.
The Uber driver’s case is one of 27 alleged bias crimes against black people that Denver police investigated between January 2016 and August 2018, according to data provided to The Denver Post as part of ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project. Of those incidents, four resulted in criminal convictions and one case is ongoing, court records show. But none of the defendants were convicted of committing a bias-motivated crime and instead pleaded guilty to other charges, court records show.
ProPublica, a national nonprofit news outlet, requested all police reports flagged as potential hate crimes against black people from 10 police jurisdictions during that time period as part of its project to create reliable data on hate crimes across the nation. ProPublica chose to focus on the racial group specifically because the cost of requesting the records for all hate crimes reported in each city would have been too expensive, said Rachel Glickhouse, one of the project’s managers.
While the Denver Police Department posts data about alleged hate crimes the agency investigates, it’s difficult to track how many of those investigations lead to convictions of bias-motivated crimes.
The alleged incidents varied widely, the police reports show: One man continuously harassed his black neighbors, including writing racial slurs on their car and slashing their tires. A man having a medical emergency on an RTD bus spat on a black paramedic who tried to help him and called him racial slurs. Another man was driving on Eighth Avenue with his 2-year-old son when a stranger drove up in a separate vehicle and threatened to kill the black man and his son, using racial slurs.
Prosecuting bias-motivated crimes is difficult because prosecutors have to prove that a person’s actions were motivated from the beginning by bias toward a protected class of people, Denver Assistant District Attorney Ryan Brackley said. In many other crimes, prosecutors do not have to prove a defendant’s motivation.
“When you add in that piece that we have to prove what was going through someone’s mind, our burden of proof is even higher,” Brackley said. “These are tough cases.”
Denver District Attorney Beth McCann formed a dedicated unit of experienced prosecutors in early 2017 to handle the complex bias-motivated crime cases, Brackley said. While the seven attorneys in the unit also manage regular caseloads, they are the only ones who handle the one or two hate crimes referred to the office each week, he said.
Many of the attorneys in the unit have backgrounds in handling domestic violence and sex assault cases and work routinely with the Denver Police Department’s dedicated hate crime unit, Brackley said.
“We’re dealing with a very vulnerable population and these folks are used to dealing with people in vulnerable places,” he said.
Statewide, the number of reported hate crimes has changed little over the past few years as the number of hate crimes nationally continues to rise, according to data reported to the FBI by some local law enforcement agencies. Colorado agencies reported a total of 106 hate crimes in 2017, the most recent year for which complete data is available.
Denver police investigated three alleged incidents of anti-black crime in 2016, 13 such crimes in 2017 and 10 in the first eight months of 2018, the ProPublica data show.
That’s far less than the number of investigations in jurisdictions of similar sizes. Seattle police investigated 81 bias crimes against black people between January 2016 and March 2018, ProPublica data show. Police in Boston, which has about 19,000 less people, investigated 199 such crimes in the same time period. Boston’s black population is more than double those in Denver and Seattle.
Solid data about hate crimes are hard to come by and vary widely based on location. The FBI data depends on local law enforcement agencies, which use a variety of tracking methods and are not required to report their numbers. About 178 agencies in Colorado — including Fort Collins, Thornton, Lakewood and Westminster — reported that they did not investigate a single hate crime last year.
The Denver District Attorney’s Office has started collecting statistics on hate crimes, but Brackley said there isn’t enough data yet to see any trends.
“We’re just trying to get it right and make it accurate,” he said.
If you know of a hate crime to report to ProPublica’s Documenting Hate Project, visit denverpost.com/documenting-hate/.
