Biden admin elevated hate crimes to national threat priority: FBI Director

The Biden administration has made hate crimes a national threat priority, a top US government official has told lawmakers, highlighting that the Jewish community faces nearly 60 percent of all such faith-based attacks by terrorist organizations across the country. spectrum.

At a congressional hearing, FBI Director Christipher Wray told lawmakers that the FBI is addressing the rise in hate crimes through a range of law enforcement efforts, including joint terrorism task forces, hate crime investigations and intelligence sharing.

“We address both through investigations and investigations through outreach and intelligence sharing, both through all 56 joint terrorism task forces. And on the hate crimes side, we’ve elevated hate crimes to a national threat priority. We have had a lot of contact with the Jewish community, both nationally and with organizations, he said.

Wray said he has personally participated a number of times and that every FBI field office does as well.

We’ve done active shooter training for those places of worship, etc. But the reality is that the Jewish community is uniquely targeted by virtually every terrorist organization across the spectrum, he said.

When you look at a group that makes up roughly 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, it should be shocking to anyone that that same population is responsible for approximately 60 percent of all religion-based hate crimes. And so they need our help, Wray said in response to a question.

The FBI, he said, has created a Domestic Terrorism-Hate Crimes Fusion Cell to try to address offenses, hate-based violent extremist crimes against faith-based communities, which can be either domestic terrorism or hate crimes.

The idea was to bring together the expertise of both. That, in turn, led to some of the first proactive hate crimes, including in particular the one I can think of: a disruption of an attempted bombing of a synagogue, he said.

We’ve had a number of cases like this, so we’ve also elevated hate crimes to a national threat priority. So it’s a comprehensive outreach to faith-based communities. It is an extensive investigation. Just in the few years that I have been director, we have had a fair number of attacks or attempted attacks on synagogues that we have disrupted, he added.

Attempted bombings of synagogues in Colorado and Nevada. Attempted shooting of synagogues in California. Obviously we had the Colleyville situation. I’ve personally been to the Tree of Life crime scene, so it’s a big deal. It’s something we’re actively working on, Wray said.