The Kansas City’s FBI Division is joining the nationwide hate crime awareness campaign called “Protecting Our Communities Together: Report Hate Crimes.”
The campaign was first launched in June of 2021, but cities all over the country have started to take part in spreading awareness of hate crimes.
The campaign will be concentrated in Springfield, St. Joseph, Topeka, and Wichita and the Kansas City Metropolitan area from Oct. 1 to Nov. 30. To spread awareness, different billboards are being created and information can be found on public buses. The FBI Division is also hoping this new campaign will bring more attention to 23 year old Alonzo Brooks’ unfinished homicide case from 2004.
Via Federal Bureau of Investigation Kansas City Division (KSN.com)
Brooks attended a party in La Cygne, Kansas with more than 100 people. He went missing later that night, and was gone for a month before his friends and family conducted a search for him. They found his body near the party’s location within an hour .
In 2020, his body was exhumed and his death was ruled as a homicide with no arrests, charges, or answers found about what happened to him. Since then, the FBI has been offering $100,000 for any information on the case.
According to Fox 4, Former U.S. Attorney for Kansas Steve McAllister believes this was a hate crime because Brooks was one of three African Americans in attendance.
The FBI defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”
In 2022, there were more than 11,288 single-biased incidents involving 13,278 victims reported on the official FBI website, though many more hate crimes go unreported.
According to Fox 4, hate crimes are typically underreported, and they are the FBI’s top focus for its civil rights program because of the lasting impact they have on communities.
“There’s simply no place in this country for hate and intolerance,” FBI Associate Deputy Director Jeffrey Sallet said on fbi.gov. “We in the FBI stand ready to use all the tools at our disposal to reduce the threat of hate crimes and fulfill our mission to protect every American.”
