LANSING, Mich. (MIRS News) – Many would argue that Michigan doesn’t have adequate penalties to punish those who commit hate crimes. That could change, however, under a package of bills currently being considered in the House’s Criminal Justice Committee.

Je Donna Dinges, a Detroit native, said her family was a target of ethnic intimidation in 2021 when her Grosse Pointe Park neighbor displayed a Ku Klux Klan flag in his window, which was a broomstick away from her window.

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The Wayne County prosecutor’s office determined there wasn’t enough evidence to charge the neighbor with ethnic intimidation because current law, MCL 750.147b, requires physical contact, damage, destruction, defacement of property or threats in order to pursue charges.

“My daughter and I were terrified. My daughter would awaken from her sleep with nightmares of our neighbor shooting through the dining room and killing us,” said Dinges, who formed an ethnic intimidation work group in 2021.

“He couldn’t be prosecuted because he did not harm us physically. … Had this legislation been in place, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym WORTHY would have been able to bring charges,” she added. “He would have been held accountable.”

The Michigan Hate Crime Act package – HB 4474, HB 4475, HB 4476 and HB 4477 from Reps. Noah Arbit (D-West Bloomfield), Kristian C. Grant (D-Grand Rapids) and Ranjeev Puri (D-Canton) – would expand Michigan’s 1988 Ethnic Intimidation Statute to include sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, physical or mental disability and age as well as ethnicity.

Under the bills, hate crime’s definition would include intimidation or harassment, causing bodily injury or severe mental anguish and use of force, and it would include harsher penalties, such as increasing ethnic intimidation’s two-year punishment to five years.

Currently, anyone convicted of the two-year crime cannot receive additional punishment if he or she is a habitual offender and they would be eligible to possess firearms – factors Attorney General Dana Nessel said would change if the bill package is made law.

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Worthy, whose office handles 65% of all criminal cases in the state, agreed that the bills will give prosecutors the tools needed, including adding classes of people who need to be protected such as seniors and those with disabilities.

The bills also add aggravating factors, such as causing bodily injury or severe mental anguish, or targeting a child.

“The rise in hate crimes is real,” she said. “. . . It is worse when someone is assaulted in the most intimate of ways. It is worse when that person has a weapon. It is worse when it’s a gang rape situation by more than one person. It is worse when it’s a child . . .

We tolerate hate in this state because we don’t have the tools,” Worthy added.

The bill package also would prohibit the destruction or vandalism of community institutions, such as houses of worship, community centers and nonprofit headquarters or cemeteries.

Rep. Kelly Breen (D-Novi) questioned how to help build empathy and how to help educate society in order to avoid these crimes because one cannot legislate how others think.

Nessel said programs, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, do exist for education purposes and there are groups working on addressing hate crime, but no one can make someone like another.

“We’re not criminalizing hate,” Arbit noted, earlier recognizing that hate is a social ill. “We’re criminalizing hate when it dovetails with a criminal act. That’s what we’re prosecuting.”