Building community capacity to report hate crimes and bias incidents in Washington state.

The Washington State Attorney General's Office seeks funding to increase the identification and reporting of hate crimes and bias incidents in Washington State through the "Building Community Capacity to Report Hate Crimes and Bias Incidents in Washington State" program. In 2024, legislation passed to create a statewide hate crimes and bias incidents hotline. This was in response to communities organizing together to address the stark increase in hate crimes and bias incidents in recent years, the widespread underreporting of such incidents, and the lack of a centralized reporting system and data on bias incidents in Washington. The hotline will be piloted in three jurisdictions starting July 1, 2025, and scale statewide beginning July 1, 2027.

The state-allocated funding from the 2024 legislation provides the base funding to operate the hotline. This project will provide critical funding to partner with community-based and/or population-specific organizations representing groups most affected by hate crimes, bias incidents, violence, and victimization. The goal is to ensure the new resource is informed by community, trusted by community, and is a culturally responsive, trauma-informed resource that effectively increases identification and reporting. The hotline's relevancy and ability to collect statewide data to inform policy decisions will only be effective if communities most impacted and targeted by hate crimes and bias incidents have the awareness and tools to identify and report such incidents.

Each community-based organization (CBO) will execute an outreach and engagement strategy tailored to their community's specific cultural, linguistic, and other relevant considerations to inform and educate their community on identifying and reporting hate crimes and bias incidents. The Attorney General's Office will also contract with a marketing agency to develop a public awareness toolkit, translated into 16 languages, and accompanied by a dissemination plan to ensure accessibility and promote its use across diverse communities.