Hate Crime Statistics

HATE CRIME STATISTICS, 2002.
United States Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Web-posted November 12, 2003.

When Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, lawmakers mandated the collection of information regarding crimes motivated by a bias against race, religion, sexual orientation, and/or ethnicity/national origin. The Attorney General designated the FBI to satisfy that requirement. With the cooperation and assistance of many local and state law enforcement agencies familiar with the investigation of hate crimes and the collection of related information, the UCR [Unified Crime Reports] Program created a data collection system to comply with the congressional mandate. The Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 amended the Hate Crime Statistics Act to include bias against disabilities. The FBI started gathering data for the additional bias motivation on January 1, 1997.
A review of the 7,459 single-bias hate crime incidents reported in 2002 showed that 48.8 percent were racially motivated, 19.1 percent were based on a bias against a religious group, 16.7 percent were motivated by a bias against a sexual orientation, 14.8 percent resulted from an ethnicity/national origin bias, and 0.6 percent were based on a disability bias.
Of the 8,832 hate crime offenses reported in 2002, 67.5 percent were crimes against persons, 32.0 percent were crimes against property, and less than 1 percent were crimes against society. Intimidation was the most frequently reported crime against persons at 52.1 percent. The offense of destruction/damage/vandalism, at 83.1 percent, was the most often reported crime against property.

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hatecrime2002.pdf [pdf format, 148 pages]

Item# 04AD112 MPP Theme: 12SIB Geo: USA


2003 JOB SEARCH PRIVACY STUDY. JOB SEARCHING IN THE NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT: CONSUMER PRIVACY BENCHMARKS.
Pam Dixon.
World Privacy Forum. November 11, 2003.

In a little over a decade in the United States and elsewhere, the business of searching for a job has moved primarily from a process based on mailing or carrying a hard-copy resume to an electronic transmission process, whether in the form of a job-bank registry, an emailed resume, or filling out online forms, or some combination of these or other digitized procedures. According to the author of this new report, “This changed applicant process has, overall, not had a beneficial effect on the job seeker.”
Dixon’s research of the privacy policies in the online employment industry is full of very useful data that job-seekers and web designers should look at. Besides the usual caveats related to the potential threats of identity theft and misuse of personal data, Dixon uncovered some interesting information, such as the following: “Researchers have submitted a Freedom of Information Act request regarding USAJOBS.gov and StudentJobs.gov. These two sites are the Federal Government’s official job sites. In the privacy policy posted at these sites, no mention is made that Monster.com is the government contractor that is operating these sites.”
The Consumer Guide provides dozens of job-search site addresses, along with the privacy policies attached to each.

Report:
http://www.worldprivacyforum.org/wpfjobstudy.pdf [pdf format, 82 pages]
Executive Summary:
http://www.worldprivacyforum.org/execsumm.pdf [pdf format, 6 pages]
Consumer Guide:
http://www.worldprivacyforum.org/wpfconsumerguide.pdf [pdf format, 22 pages]

Item# 04AD113 MPP Theme: 12RLG Geo: Global


LOST IN TRANSIT: GLOBAL CFC SMUGGLING TRENDS AND THE NEED FOR FASTER PHASE-OUT.
Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). November 10, 2003.

[Note: The Environmental Investigation Agency is a non-profit NGO based in London and Washington DC committed to investigating and exposing environmental crime. EIA has been actively tracking the global illegal trade in ozone depleting substances (ODS) since the mid 1990s to provide information to the Montreal Protocol and other relevant bodies.]

This report analyzes complex chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) smuggling operations spanning three continents and including Singapore, South Africa, and the United States. It reveals the global nature of the illegal trade and exposes CFC smuggling operations coordinated by Singaporean dealers who seek to deceive US authorities and dump illegal CFCs on the American market.
EIA reveals how Singaporean companies offer to sell CFCs to the U.S., mislead the US Environmental Protection Agency, and engineer elaborate international trading schemes to avoid U.S. enforcement efforts. One scam involves the gold mines of South Africa. As used CFCs are legally permitted to import into the U.S., opportunistic traders claim to extract CFCs from refrigeration equipment required in South Africa's goldmines. However, the CFCs are often not genuine used material at all, but a mixture of used and illegal virgin material, or illegal virgin CFCs that have been deliberately contaminated to give the appearance of used chemicals, which fetch a very high price on the lucrative U.S. market. To facilitate this scam, virgin CFCs are smuggled into South Africa through the neighboring countries.

http://www.eia-international.org/cgi/reports/report-files/media65-1.pdf [pdf format, 20 pages]

Item# 04AD114 MPP Theme: 14 Geo: Global


THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE: ENVIRONMENT IN THE FREE TRADE AREA OF THE AMERICAS.
Audley, John
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. November 2003.

When they meet this November in Miami, Florida, the 34 trade ministers of the Western Hemisphere will do whatever they can to keep the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations from running aground. The lack of progress in key trade areas such as market access, agriculture, and investment, as well as competing trade negotiations involving other FTAA members, have turned the negotiation's scheduled 2004 completion date into a daunting finish line.
Audley notes that the regulatory enforcement approach to the trade and environment challenge taken by the United States has often been interpreted by its developing country trading partners as an effort to coerce them into enforcing their own environmental laws, or risk trade sanctions. Agreeing to what they see as new environmental conditions for access to the U.S. market taps into a deeply rooted fear among developing countries that the United States is using environmental laws to protect its markets from foreign competition. It also conjures up ghosts of earlier U.S. efforts to coerce Latin American governments to adopt U.S. policy priorities. This approach may be appropriate for countries like Australia or Singapore, who already enjoy the capacity to develop and implement sound environmental laws. It may also be suitable for governments like Chile, Brazil, and perhaps even Mexico. However, according to the author, “this approach is poisonous for countries with little or no capacity to protect their environment, like those in Central America, the Caribbean, and many other parts of the hemisphere. “

Note: The Spanish-language version cited below forms the first 3 pages of a larger publication on trade and sustainable development.

Note: Contains copyrighted material.

http://www.ceip.org/files/pdf/issuebriefnov2003.pdf [English-language, pdf format, 6 pages]
http://www.ictsd.org/monthly/puentes/Puentes4-3.pdf [Spanish-language, pdf format, 3 pages]

Item# 04AD115 MPP Theme: 5O Geo: WHA


FEWER IMMIGRANTS, A WARMER WELCOME: FIXING A BROKEN IMMIGRATION POLICY.
Mark Kriko.
Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). November 2003.

The author takes a firm stand on what he sees as necessary fixes to the current U.S. immigration policies. “To fix immigration’s broken windows the authorities need to start taking immigration violations seriously. To take only one example, people who repeatedly sneak across the border are supposed to be prosecuted and jailed, and the Border Patrol unveiled a new digital fingerprint system in the mid-90s to make tracking of repeat crossers possible. The problem is that short-staffed U.S. Attorney’s offices kept increasing the number of apprehensions needed to trigger prosecution so as to avoid actually having to prosecute anyone.”
He focuses on several specific measures: “The initiative that would yield the most bang for the buck would be enforcement of employer sanctions (the jargon term for the ban on hiring illegal aliens). Ideally, we need a national employment-eligibility verification system, which would allow employers to determine which new hires have the right to work in the United States. The INS developed, and its successor agencies continue to operate, several pilot programs along these lines, and participating employers are generally pleased with them.”

http://www.cis.org/articles/2003/back1503.pdf [pdf format, 8 pages]

Item# 04AD116 MPP Theme: 8A Geo: USA


HOW MUCH INFORMATION? 2003.
Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian, et al.
University of California, Berkeley. The School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS). Web-posted October 30, 2003.

This study is an attempt to estimate how much new information is created each year. Newly created information is distributed in four storage media – print, film, magnetic, and optical – and seen or heard in four information flows – telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet. This study of information storage and flows analyzes the year 2002 in order to estimate the annual size of the stock of new information contained in storage media, and heard or seen each year in information flows. Where reliable data was available the researchers compared the 2002 findings to those of their 2000 study (which used 1999 data) in order to identify trends – recognizing that 1999-2002 were years of relatively low economic activity. [The 2000 study is located on the Web at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info .]
Among the SIMS team’s finding: “Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.” For comparison purposes, the authors inform us that five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections. Another way they explain it is that five exabytes is equivalent to “all words ever spoken by human beings.”

Note: In addition to the urls provided below, there is a Table of Contents page, with links to data on “Stored Information” and “Information Flows” at: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003 .

Full Report:
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/printable_report.pdf [pdf format, 112 pages]
Executive Summary:
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/execsum.htm [html format, 12 printed pages]

Item# 04AD117 MPP Theme: 12IC Geo: Global


PREVENTING NUCLEAR TERRORISM: A PROGRESS UPDATE.
Matthew Bunn.
Harvard University, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs/ Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). October 22, 2003.

While progress has been made in securing vulnerable nuclear material stockpiles around the world, there remains a dangerous gap between the pace of progress and the scope and urgency of the threat, according to this analysis by Matthew Bunn of Harvard University. Only 41 percent of Russia’s nuclear materials have received U.S.-funded “rapid” security upgrades or more comprehensive upgrades to date, according to official data cited in Bunn’s paper, released by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).
The paper outlines the continuing nuclear threat, summarizes the progress made in the last year and the gaps that remain, and recommends steps to close the gap between the threat and the response. According to the analysis, three elements are essential in reducing these threats:
1) Remove the nuclear materials (highly enriched uranium and plutonium) entirely from the world’s most vulnerable sites;
2) Accelerate and strengthen cooperative efforts with Russia to secure nuclear stockpiles; and
3) Build a fast-paced global partnership of nations working together to improve security for nuclear materials around the world.

http://www.nti.org/c_press/analysis_cnwmupdate_102203.pdf [pdf format, 19 pages]

Item# 04AD118 MPP Theme: 2G Geo: Global


BUILDING REGIONAL SECURITY COOPERATION IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE: ISSUES AND RECOMMENDATIONS.
Max G. Manwaring, Wendy Fontela, Mary Grizzard, and Dennis Rempe.
U.S. Army War College. Strategic Studies Institute. October 2003.

Last March a conference entitled “Building Regional Security in the Western Hemisphere” was co-sponsored by the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Southern Command, and University of Miami North- South Center. This document summarizes hours of tapes and reams of notes to clarify the issues and develop actionable recommendations.
The report emphasizes four highly related needs and associated recommendations:
* The need to advance hemispheric understanding of the security concerns of each country, and those that the region as a whole faces (e.g., the internal and external threat(s) to security);
* The need to develop multilateral, civil-military structures and processes to identify and address threats in the contemporary security environment;
* The need to foster expanded dialogue, consultations, and cooperation for building consensus principles and concepts for regional security cooperation;
* The need to adapt U.S. military efficacy to the contemporary threat environment in the hemisphere at the strategic level.

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/2003/building/building.pdf [pdf format, 46 pages]

Item# 04AD119 MPP Theme: 1H Geo: WHA


DEALING WITH INCREASED RISK OF NATURAL DISASTERS: CHALLENGES AND OPTIONS. [IMF Working Paper No. 03/197]
Paul Freeman, Michael J. Keen, and Muthukumara Mani.
International Monetary Fund (IMF). October 2003.

Natural disaster risk is emerging as an increasingly important constraint on economic development and poverty reduction. This paper first sets out the key facts in the topic area - that the costs of disaster have been increasing, seem set to continue to increase, and bear especially heavily on the poorest. It then reviews the key economic issues at stake, focusing in particular on the actual and prospective roles of, and interaction between, market instruments and public interventions in dealing with disaster risk. Key sources of market failure include the difficulty of risk spreading and, perhaps even more fundamental, the Samaritan's dilemma: the underinvestment in protective measures associated with the rational expectation that others will provide support if disaster occurs. Innovations addressing each of these are discussed.
Included as an Appendix is an assessment, by region, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), of the probable/possible effects of significant climate change.

Note: Contains copyrighted material.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2003/wp03197.pdf [pdf format, 38 pages]

Item# 04AD120 MPP Theme: 14D Geo: Global