From posters by a white supremacy group placed on the University of Wisconsin-Superior campus to the six members of the Sikh religion fatally gunned down at a temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin has a troubling history of bias incidents and hate crimes in recent years.
By some accounts, such incidents are on the rise since the presidential campaign of 2016.
That is why the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism is partnering with ProPublica and its Documenting Hate project to collect reports of bias incidents and hate crimes in our state. The nationwide project includes dozens of news, academic and advocacy organizations that have joined to expose the impact of bigotry in America.
Beginning today, the Center is asking residents who have witnessed or experienced hate crimes or incidents of bias to report them using the form on our website. These reports will be used for our reporting on bigotry and become part of ProPublica’s national database. Names of submitters will not be shared outside of the coalition without the submitter’s permission.
The project seeks to document hate crimes defined as those “motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.” Documenting Hate also is collecting reports of bias incidents — such as hate speech or threats — based on those same categories.
In addition, the Center is investigating hate groups in Wisconsin. Such groups espouse philosophies that encourage discrimination, hate or violence against people because of their race, because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, members of ethnic or religious groups, immigrants, women or others. People with information about such hate groups should contact the Center at tips@wisconsinwatch.org.
The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, other news media and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by the Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Credit should be given, in this format: “By Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin Watch”
- If published online, you must include the links and link to wisconsinwatch.org
- If you share the story on social media, please mention @wisconsinwatch (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram)
- Don’t sell the story — it may not be marketed as an individual product.
- Don’t sell ads against the story. But you can publish it with pre-sold ads.
- Your website must include a prominent way to contact you.
- Additional elements that are packaged with our story must be labeled.
- Users can republish our photos, illustrations, graphics and multimedia elements ONLY with stories with which they originally appeared. You may not separate multimedia elements for standalone use.
- If we send you a request to change or remove Wisconsin Watch content from your site, you must agree to do so immediately.
For questions regarding republishing rules please contact Andy Hall, executive director, at ahall@wisconsinwatch.org