By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

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Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a nationally known author and political analyst. He is not a staff member of DiversityInc.

The resignation of the Justice Department's top-gun civil-rights enforcer Wan J. Kim came against the backdrop of sharp Congressional criticism that the department is outrageously politicized with conservative Bush appointees. The not-so-subtle inference was that civil-rights enforcement had virtually ceased to exist. There were ironies all over this charge and story. Start with Wan Kim, the now-former Justice Department's Civil Rights Division head.

He is the first Korean and first immigrant to head the Civil Rights Division. Kim shot back to critics that the division had spurred federal and state prosecutions of cold-case civil-rights murders of decades past and that the division has aggressively pursued voter-fraud cases mostly aimed at diluting minority voting strength in some counties.

Kim also echoed a claim that Bush made in a speech to the Urban League in July 2004. Bush boasted that the Justice Department vigorously enforces civil-rights laws. Then Attorney General John Ashcroft went further and asserted that the Justice Department had brought more civil-rights prosecutions in Bush's first three years in office than Bill Clinton's Justice Department had brought in his last three years. That was a stunning boast when Ashcroft made it in 2004, and it's just as stunning coming from Kim three years later.

Unfortunately, the numbers don't match their boasts. According to statistics from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, civil-rights prosecutions have plunged since Clinton's last years in office. The FBI has grown even laxer in recommending civil-rights prosecutions during Bush's terms. The number of cases it recommended for prosecution has dropped by one-third.

Here are some specific numbers: The Bush administration's Justice Department filed 35 Title VII employment-discrimination cases. Clinton's Justice Department filed 92 cases. The number of housing-discrimination cases has been cut in half from the number filed under Clinton. Even the much-touted, high-media-profile federal prosecutions of the old Southern race-murder cases have been wildly inflated. Most of the cases were brought by state prosecutors and convictions have been won in state courts.

The Bush administration's see-no-evil approach to civil-rights enforcement is not because fewer Americans are breaking civil-rights laws. During Bush's tenure, the FBI has noted every year in its annual report on hate crimes in America that the number of hate crimes has either jumped or remained steady. Nearly 40 percent of them are racially motivated, with blacks still the most frequent target of hate-mongers. But the number of reported hate crimes barely scrapes the surface of civil-rights lawbreaking in America.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a public advocacy group that tracks hate crimes, puts the actual number of hate crimes at more than 50,000 yearly.

The truth is that Bush, and in all fairness other presidents and their attorneys general as well, have never placed a high premium on civil-rights cases. They see them as no-win cases with little political gain and lots of political headaches. If federal officials aggressively pursue civil-rights prosecutions, they risk stepping on the toes of local police, district attorneys and state officials. The rare time that the feds cracked down on civil-rights violence was during the civil-rights battles of the 1960s. The wave of violence then stirred national and international revulsion and forced the Johnson administration momentarily to order more civil-rights prosecutions.

There's also the belief that hate crimes are mostly things of the past. When they do occur, they are isolated acts committed by a handful of quacks and unreconstructed bigots. There's also the belief that state authorities vigorously report and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. Nothing could be further from the truth as shown by the Southern Poverty Law Center's estimate of the true magnitude of hate-crime violence.

A big reason for the gaping discrepancy in number is that many police departments still refuse to report hate crimes or to label crimes in which LGBTs and other traditionally underrepresented groups are targeted because of race or sexual orientation as hate crimes. When Congress passed the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990, it compelled the FBI to collect figures on hate violence. However, it did not compel police agencies to report them. Record-keeping on hate crimes is still left up to the discretion of local police chiefs and city officials. Many don't bother compiling them because they regard hate crimes as a politically loaded minefield that can tarnish their image and create even more racial friction. They see no need to allocate more resources to enable police to recognize and combat hate violence.

However, that's absolutely no excuse for the Justice Department's failure to bring more civil-rights cases against landlords, mortgage companies, employers and vote registrars that blatantly engage in discrimination. But as congressional investigators found, the Bush administration is more interested in packing the department with appointees that pass Bush's litmus test of political loyalty than vigorously enforcing civil rights. In that case, civil rights will always take a back seat. Kim's resignation under a cloud certainly underscores that sad fact.

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