FB-ISAO Hosts the HAte Crimes Community ENgagement Working Group

By their very nature, Faith-Based Organizations believe in something and that can make them targets for hostile events which could include hate incidents. In August of 2020, the Faith-Based Information Sharing and Analysis Organization (FB-ISAO) partnered with the DC Chapter of InfraGard (InfraGardNCR) to host three webinars on hate incidents in DC and Northern Virginia.

• Part I: Overview of hate crimes
• Part II: A case study
• Part III: Community conversation

Following the success of the series, a couple of things happened. The initial planning group agreed that the discussion that stemmed from Part III (community conversation) should continue. The program was expanded to include the NY Metro Chapter of InfraGard. HACCEN was born! HACCEN is the HAte Crimes Community ENgagement Working Group. A Working Group is sometimes referred to as WG. HACCEN is an initiative to support vulnerable communities and individuals who may experience hate crimes. HACCEN’s mission is to develop, foster, and facilitate a private-public partnership to help raise awareness of hate crimes or incidents in our communities and to share real-time information about threats, incidents, indicators, trends, and best practices to mitigate risks associated with hate crimes.

HACCEN hosted a series of awareness webinars that were designed to raise awareness and to get people engaged in support of the HACCEN mission, by way of information exchange. The members of the HACCEN succeeded in starting conversations about hate crimes. In addition, the working group found ways to work together to possibly mitigate and support victims as well as victimized communities.

HACCEN Accomplishments

• Increased awareness about hate crimes and incidents
• Regular engagement on the HACCEN listserver
• 07 February 2022 webinar on Hate Crimes and Religion
• 09 March 2022 webinar on Hate Crimes & Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry
• 18 May 2022 webinar on HACCEN Hate Crimes & Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, or Disability
• Several victims of hate crimes were helped directly, and quickly, after reaching out to InfraGard coordinator

Unfortunately, and for a variety of reasons, in January of 2023, HACCEN in its original state, could not continue. However, the mission of HACCEN is an important one. There are so many good reasons to develop, foster, and facilitate a private-public partnership to help raise awareness of hate crimes or incidents in our communities and to share real-time information about threats, incidents, indicators, trends, and best practices to mitigate risks associated with hate crimes. As such, the FB-ISAO has and will continue to support the information exchange on our collaborative workspace. We also hope that we will be able to spark more collaboration. FB-ISAO will host a channel on our Slack workspace to further the mission of HACCEN. The channel will allow for information sharing much like the HAACEN listserve did. Please consider self-joining the #og_hate_incidents on our collaborative workspace. If you are not a member of FB-ISAO and would like to join, please visit our membership page for more information.

There are also many other initiatives that are doing good work on finding ways to mitigate hate crimes. The list below highlights just a few of those efforts:

• The Biden White House held a summit on hate crimes on 15 September 2022. The uniters who participated in the summit are affiliated with organizations that are doing work in this space: https://unitedwestand.gov.
• Eradicate Hate Global Summit: https://eradicatehatesummit.org.
• Each FBI field office hosts a Multi-Cultural Engagement Council, where field office executive leaders meet regularly with representatives from community and faith-based organizations.  If you’d like to join your local MCEC, contact your local FBI field office and ask to speak to your local community outreach specialist.

There are also some actions that organizations can take to improve their threat awareness and security posture. Some of those actions are:

• Engage local law enforcement and understand the risk within your respective location.
• Conduct a physical security inspection of your facility to identify potential security gaps or issues that could contribute to threat activity in and around your location. Reference last week’s FB-ISAO Advisory for some tips on low-cost measures organizations can employ in and around their facility to address this.
• Educate members on the latest trends and patterns, specifically if there is a potential risk or threat within your respective location.
• Train employees, volunteers, and members on how to respond to a hate-based attack. Equally important is ensuring that employees and volunteers know how to report or escalate incidents.
• Practice incident responses.

In summary, there is plenty of good work being done to combat hate crimes, but there is much work that still needs to be done. Unfortunately, hate continues to be very pervasive in our world. We won’t have all the answers on how to combat hate incidents and hate crimes, however, perhaps by collaborating about these types of events, we can possibly find ways to bring down the level of incidents and to support one another as we navigate through hostile events that affect so many in so many ways.