LPD: Bias crimes consistent, bias incidents underreported
Presenting his agency’s annual bias crime review to the Laramie City Council, Police Chief Brian Browne said city stats depend on the community’s willingness to report.
Laramie recorded three potentially bias-related crimes and zero bias-related incidents in 2024, according to a presentation last week from City Police Chief Brian Browne.
The chief reports to the Laramie City Council annually on both bias crimes and bias incidents — the distinction being that a bias crime would be a crime all on its own but which is tied to a specific, targeted animus while a bias incident does not rise to the level of criminal activity.
The report, by Browne’s own admission, likely doesn’t capture the full scope of bias-related occurrences.
“We didn't have any documented bias incidents reported,” he told the council. “That doesn't mean that they're not occurring in our community. That means that they weren't reported to the Laramie Police Department.”
The three potentially bias-related crimes include:
An episode of disorderly conduct from February during which an alleged perpetrator used an “inappropriate slur;”
A potential vandalism of a Pride flag in June, which is Pride Month; and
A vehicle vandalism in October.
“The first one I can confirm was a bias-related incident, and we ended up issuing citations to two individuals based on disorderly conduct and harassment-type activity,” Browne said. “I can tell you that the two individuals that were cited were not long-term residents of our community.”
The status of the other two crimes is a little foggier.
In the second listed crime, a member of the LGBTQ+ community found their Pride flag in a nearby flower bed, potentially removed from its flagpole by a vandal. But Browne said there’s not enough evidence to say.
“We don’t know if the wind took it off the flagpole, if it was knocked over, or somebody went and threw it on the ground,” he said. “There was no additional damage. It wasn’t ripped but based on the person claiming to be part of that [LGBTQ+] community, we took it as a bias crime report. And we do that to give our friends on the federal side access to the report — and they can make the ultimate determination if it rises to their criteria or checks their boxes.”
The final crime was indeed a crime. Someone vandalized a vehicle by breaking its windshield wipers. The victim was transgender.
Browne said the vandalism could be bias–motivated, but without a suspect, the motivation is unknown.
“They [the victim] were not there when it occurred,” Browne said. “There’s no video camera available. We were unable to identify who a suspect may be, and we were unable to determine if it was actually related to their gender orientation.”
What the report doesn’t show
Notably, the report does not include the string of antisemitic comments which disrupted Laramie City Council meetings for a six-month period ending in March 2024. That campaign began in 2023 and was recorded in last year’s report.
The report also does not include an unsolved November incident in which someone vandalized a car with the word “PEDO.”
Presumably, the graffiti is a reference to the “groomer panic” that paints members of the LGBTQ+ community as individuals looking to harm children. The victims of this crime are members of the LGBTQ+ community, but because they are also prominent members of the local furry scene, the animus behind the vandalism is unclear.
Browne told the Laramie Reporter his agency uses federal definitions for bias crimes, which do not list furries as a protected class.
“I actually reached out to the FBI to get clarification on that one, because we had that marked as a potential [bias crime],” Browne said. “But it doesn’t meet the FBI classification under one of the hate crime areas.”
Browne said the report has to adhere to clear definitions because, in a broad enough sense, every crime is a bias crime.
“Every crime we investigate, I’d say probably 100% of the time, involves some type of bias — so whether it's implicit bias or a bias against the person, or an activity, or an event, or piece of property,” he said. “When someone’s vandalizing against another tagging crew, or a gang, they would have a bias against another gang. So we’re going with the federal government’s definition of a hate crime, or a bias-related hate crime event. Otherwise, it’s opening up a huge, broad category for us.”
Crime reporting
Beyond the difficulty with definitions, Browne said it’s challenging to track bias crimes and incidents.
“The example I like to use is: if you go into the middle school or the high school, it’s pretty typical to stand in those hallways, or have your kids in those hallways, and hear pretty derogatory statements,” Browne told the council. “It’s kind of a cultural thing — not just here in Laramie, but really across our nation — and a lot of those are not tracked. And that does not mean that people are not offended, or that people are not desirous of reporting that. However, maybe they’re uncomfortable to do so, or maybe the school district handles those situations from an administrative perspective.”
But it is at least getting easier to pull reports about the bias crimes and incidents that are reported to the police. LPD has moved from the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system it once used to the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), following a national trend.
Both the old UCR and the new NIBRS platform are used by the FBI to collect statistics from agencies around the country about a wide range of criminal activity.
“It’s very easy for us to pull data out of our system now,” Browne said. “It’s pretty consistent that I’ll get asked by a community member, maybe a member of council Human Trafficking Task Force, for data regarding a specific crime, and we can actually pull that data relatively quickly, within a few hours, if not minutes.”
Browne told the council 74% of Wyoming law enforcement agencies — covering 88% of the state’s population — now use NIBRS, which he called a “more robust data collection system.”
“So we can give you accurate data,” he said. “However, it is dependent on what’s reported to us as a community. So if community members are not comfortable reporting crimes to the police department, then we may not have some of that data.”
To this end, Browne and councilors highlighted the city’s online citizen complaint portal, where reports can be filed anonymously.
“We have a great relationship with all of our council members, all of our city officials, and they are welcome to report to any of those individuals, and it’ll make it our way,” Browne said. “I would hope that we’re doing enough on our community relations side, and I believe we have a significant footprint in the community to encourage those people to feel comfortable with their officers. But we’re willing to go talk to anybody that we can.”
Albany County fielded more than 31,000 calls for service in 2024. Nationally, Browne said about 240 million 911 calls were made last year, with roughly 11,500 of them resulting in bias crime determinations.
In 2022, LPD recorded three bias crimes, each targeting the LGBTQ+ community, and zero bias incidents.
In 2023, LPD recorded one bias crime (an assault) and one bias incident (the string of antisemitic disruptions that plagued city council for six months).