White men accused of killing Ahmaud Arbery won’t face Georgia hate crime charges. Here’s why.

Two white men accused of fatally shooting Ahmaud Arbery in what Arbery’s family is calling a modern-day lynching will not face hate crime charges, according to state investigators.

That’s because Georgia is one of four states in the U.S. that doesn’t have a hate crimes prevention law, according to the Department of Justice. If someone commits a crime motivated by bias, statewide authorities are unable to pursue additional charges or enhanced penalties for the perpetrator. 

“There’s no hate crime in Georgia,” Georgia Bureau of Investigations Director Vic Reynolds said in a press conference Friday morning when asked whether the men would face hate crime charges.

Retired police officer Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis, 34, were arrested by Glynn County police and charged with murder and aggravated assault Thursday night. The arrest came just 36 hours after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation began assisting in the probe, which began more than 10 weeks ago.

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Reynolds said the video of the incident that has been spread widely on social media was a key piece of evidence in the case. 

He also said the department will be investigating William Bryan, the man who filmed the incident, to determine whether he should be arrested too. 

“We are going to go wherever the evidence takes us,” Reynolds said. “In a perfect world, we would have preferred to have been asked to become involved in February, of course.”

Arbery, who was black, was killed Feb. 23 on a residential street about 2 miles from his home outside Brunswick, Georgia. Gregory McMichael told police they saw him running and believed he was a burglary suspect, so they armed themselves, got in a truck and followed him. They told police Arbery attacked them after one of the men got out of the truck with a shotgun. 

Bryan, who joined the father and son in “hot pursuit” of Arbery, recorded the killing on video, according to an internal memo obtained by USA TODAY.

But Arbery’s family and their attorneys believe Arbery was out for a jog when he was killed. They believe he was the victim of racial profiling.

A bill that would have penalized crimes committed out of bias against race, color, religion or sexual orientation passed the Georgia House last year, but the bill failed in the state Senate.

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The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus issued a statement Thursday encouraging the Senate to take up the bill when it reconvenes in June.

“In 2020, our state and our country have yet to reconcile with the vestiges of racism. At a time when we are uniting to fight against a global pandemic, another disease rears its head to again take an innocent life,” the caucus said.

Arkansas, South Carolina and Wyoming also do not have hate crimes laws, along with American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to the DOJ.

Seventeen states and Puerto Rico have hate crimes laws but don’t require data collection on hate crimes.

Even if a state or territory does not have a hate crimes law, hate crimes can still be reported to the FBI, according to the DOJ.

The DOJ says that is enforces federal hate crimes laws that cover crimes motivated by bias against race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability.

There were an average of about 204,000 hate crime victimizations each year between 2013 and 2017, according to the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Both the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI, which experts believe under-reports hate crimes totals, found that a majority of hate crimes were motivated by a bias against race or ethnicity. Of those motivated by bias against race or ethnicity, most were anti-black or anti-African American, the FBI reported in 2018.

“FBI hate crime data shows that thousands of violent hate crimes are reported every year, and these statistics fail to reflect the full extent of the problem due to underreporting,” said Xavier Persad, senior legislative counsel at the Human Rights Campaign. “State legislators must stop turning a blind eye to the persistent scourge of bias-motivated crimes and work swiftly to enact fully-inclusive hate crime protections.”

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