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LGBT advocates: Hate crime laws need to protect all community members

LGBT advocates are calling for more protections for victims of hate crimes in the wake of the Orlando mass shooting at Pulse nightclub.

The Florida attorney general says there were 73 hate crimes reported in the state in 2014 and 15 of those crimes were based on sexual orientation.

The majority of the hate crimes reported were based on race.

Jimmy Midyette, with the Jacksonville Coalition for Equality, said Florida’s hate crime law does include sexual orientation but it does not include crimes based on gender identity.

“We’ve really got a long way to go,” Midyette said. “We actually leave out an entire piece of our community in Florida in terms of how we prosecute these cases.”

Ross Murray, program director for GLAAD, told Action News Jax the law needs to protect the people most vulnerable to hate crimes.

“Transgender women of color tend to be the biggest victims of crimes and tend to be targeted the most,” Murray said. “They carry a lot of identities that are attacked for transgender status, for being a person of color. What we often find is their stories get underreported and undertold.”

LGBT advocates said there are times when hate crimes go unreported because victims fear coming forward.

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"They could lose their job," Midyette said. "They could lose their housing. They could have negative impacts by their family.”

Action News Jax law and safety expert Dale Carson said proving a case was motivated by hate can be challenging and at times prosecutors may choose not to pursue the hate crime penalty.

“It’s very difficult to find the actual smoking gun, the evidence that would prove the crime was directed by actual animus toward a given class of people,” Carson said. “The complexity is proving beyond a reasonable doubt because that’s the criminal standard, that the attack was directed at a person because of their orientation primarily.”

Murray said GLAAD works to spread awareness and acceptance in an effort to fight back against the challenges.

“When you’re familiar with someone, when you know their story, it makes it so much harder to hate them and so much harder to want to see bad things happen for them,” Murray said.

Carson said there is an added penalty for a hate crime conviction which typically means more prison time.