Victims of hate crimes in Maryland can now sue their attackers under a bill signed into law by Governor Wes Moore this week. It’s one of a handful of bills that lawmakers passed during their yearly session that deal with hate crimes, as Anti-Semitism incidents in particular are rising in the state.
SB5/HB13, which allows for victims to take civil action, takes effect October 1st. Senate president Bill Ferguson says that’s not soon enough. “In Maryland, we had 109 reported incidents of Anti-Semitism in 2022,” Ferguson said at a bill-signing ceremony Tuesday. “(That’s) a 98% increase from 2021 according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit of anti-Semetic incidents.”
Even with that rise in Anti-Semitism, the vast majority of what the state refers to as ‘hate bias incidents’ in Maryland are still against Black residents - almost 44% of the overall total in 2021, the last full year of statistics from the state.
50% of offenders that year were white - with the race of 29% of offenders not known to authorities.
Lawmakers also approved two other bills in response to the rise in hate crimes:
SB840 - Establishes the Protecting Against Hate Crimes Grant Fund within the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention, Youth, and Victim Services. Money from the fund will go non-profits, including faith-based organizations, for security upgrades to protect against hate crimes
SB841 - Requires the Governor to put $500-thousand in the annual state budget for grants to local school systems to pay for field trips to ‘museums of cultural import’. The bill identifies four such museums - The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C.; The Jewish Museum of Maryland and The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture in Baltimore.
SB842/HB1244 also make January 27th Maryland Holocaust Remembrance Day to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
