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Indifference means to neither be for nor against a cause, this can be a lack of caring, and ignoring what's happening around you (protests, world problems, etc.)

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"racial inequities are so deeply ingrained in American society that they are nearly invisible"

Racial microaggressions are a prevalent thing in our everyday life and happen without us even knowing. This kind of indifference and ignorance is ingrained into our society. For example, many times in the Western world countries, white people fail to acknowledge that someone of Asian or Latino race can be an American citizen and born in America. Even asking "Where are you from?" or "You speak English so well" is considered a microaggression. A microaggression can also be not acknowledging someone's race, also known as colour blindness, when people do this they do not recognize someone's race and the hardships they may have to face because of that.

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"The handling of Greene’s death is one of three killings of LGBT people in Kansas City since 2010 that, advocates say, should have been pursued much more vigorously as hate crimes. They say there are unresolved questions about whether the three – all of whom were black or Latino – were attacked because of their sexual orientation, gender identity or race."

Across America, police forces are failing to recognize and prosecute people for hate crimes even when there is clear evidence, while this is only one example, this kind of event is not an uncommon occurrence and continuously happens, even with people advocating against it. This is incredibly harmful as it shows homophobic and transphobic people that they can commit these crimes without repercussions.

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KANSAS CITY, Missouri - Dionte Greene, a 22-year-old black gay male, was looking for a hook-up. He reached out to an 18-year-old stranger on Facebook.

"I'm not interested in smoking weed with you, Travone," Greene wrote to the teenager, Travone Shaw, in their first exchange. "I just find you attractive and I want to have a sexual encounter with you."

"I ain't gay," Shaw replied, according to court documents. "Bro, stop in boxing me."

But hours later, Shaw contacted Greene twice and invited him to get high on marijuana. "You going to come over tonight when you get off of work?" Shaw asked.

Just after midnight on Oct. 31, 2014, Greene drove to meet the younger man. Three and a half hours later, police discovered Greene's body in his idling gold Dodge Stratus, with a single bullet in the right side of his head.

Shaw was convicted last month of involuntary manslaughter and stealing in connection to Greene's death. He faces up to 29 years in prison. But in the view of this city's LGBT community, law enforcement should have prosecuted the killing as a hate crime.

Greene's family and friends say Shaw and an accomplice lured, robbed and killed Greene because he was gay. Shaw posted anti-homosexual slurs on his Facebook profile nine times in the eight months before the killing.

1. Graphic: A legal hodgepodge

2. Video: Reconstructing the police response to an attack

Law enforcement officials said they did investigate the killing as a hate crime. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's office in Kansas City said, "The investigation did not turn out sufficient evidence to support (hate crimes) charges." The FBI declined to comment on its investigation.

Local officials said they too would struggle to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that anti-gay bias was the motive at the moment of Greene's murder. They also said a hate crimes murder conviction does not bring additional jail time in Missouri.

State prosecutors charged Shaw with murder, but no hate crime.

"After sitting at the trial, I don't think those two people were just there to steal his phone," said Melissa Brown, a local LBGT advocate. She cited Shaw's use of the prospect of sex to lure Greene to the meeting and his anti-gay slurs on Facebook.

Shaw's lawyer, Paige Bremer, did not respond to a request to comment.

The handling of Greene's death is one of three killings of LGBT people in Kansas City since 2010 that, advocates say, should have been pursued much more vigorously as hate crimes. They say there are unresolved questions about whether the three - all of whom were black or Latino - were attacked because of their sexual orientation, gender identity or race.

"I don't think those two people were just there to steal his phone."

Melissa Brown, LGBT advocate

The massacre of 49 people in an Orlando, Florida, gay bar by a self-professed jihadist has put a spotlight on hate crimes against LGBT people. As the murder cases in Kansas City show, America's system for punishing bias crimes is filled with limits and inconsistencies.

Seven years after landmark federal legislation recognized attacks on LGBT people as hate crimes, no comprehensive nationwide system exists for tracking bias crimes. And while 30 states have enacted similar laws, criminologists say many of them are poorly written and make convictions difficult.

No comprehensive, nationwide programs exist to train police and prosecutors in how to properly investigate hate crimes. And members of the LGBT community said police frequently react with indifference or hostility when hate crimes are reported.

Prosecutors say proving a hate crime can be difficult and can weaken their overall argument to a jury. But some criminologists say prosecutors have a duty to pursue hate crimes convictions nevertheless, because bias attacks terrorize entire communities, not just individuals.

"It is important to charge, even if you're not going to get a few more years, because you're telling the community you will not tolerate this," said Jack McDevitt, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, who studies hate crimes. "But many prosecutors will not take that risk."

LGBT activists say violence against the community is increasing, particularly against transgender women of color. Twenty-four LGBT or HIV-positive people were murdered in the United States in 2015 because of their sexual orientation, according to an annual survey conducted by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, an LGBT advocacy group.

Legal scholars said many state statutes were written quickly when politicians were under pressure to act on the issue. The result is a hodgepodge of standards of proof and sentences that confuse juries and judges.

In Delaware, the minimum sentence for defendants convicted of committing a bias-motivated murder is doubled, but many other states provide no such enhancement. In Iowa, meanwhile, attacking someone because of their "political affiliation" is a hate crime. In Louisiana, attacking a police officer is a hate crime. Last year, New Jersey's State Supreme Court threw out part of its hate crimes law because the standard of proof was too vague.

"The criminal codes vary the same way vegetable soup does from region to region," said Peter Joy, head of Washington University's Criminal Justice Clinic in St. Louis, Missouri. "Everyone throws in their own ingredients and comes up with their own recipe."

Created by the 1968 Civil Rights Act and expanded by Congress in 1994 and 2009, hate crimes laws are designed to add additional punishments to crimes motivated by bias against the victim's race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, disability, gender or sexual orientation.

During its first five years, the administration of President Barack Obama charged 50 percent more people with federal hate crimes than were charged during the last five years of the administration of President George W. Bush, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice said. But the number of cases is still small.

Over the last seven years, the Obama Justice Department has brought 33 federal hate crimes cases under the 2009 Shepard/Byrd Act, the spokesman said. Eleven involved discrimination based on sexual orientation. Nine of the 13 defendants in those cases were convicted, with one case pending.

On a state and local level, there is no system that reliably tracks the number of hate crimes reported or prosecuted. An FBI hate crimes database, derived from voluntary reporting by police departments, lists 1,178 reported hate crimes based on sexual orientation in 2014.

But a Justice Department survey of crime victims that same year found 50 times that number - 59,000 people - who said they were victims of hate crimes based on sexual orientation. About half of all the victims surveyed said they did not report the attack to police.

"We don't believe in police," said Arianna Lint, a Peruvian transgender woman who runs TransLatina, a support group for transgender women of color in South Florida. "In small towns, they call us 'freaks' and 'it.' "

DISTRUST IN SOUTH FLORIDA

In interviews in the Miami area after the Orlando killings, 10 transgender women told Reuters that they and others in their community are reluctant to report bias crimes because of a mistrust of the police.

Among them is Payton Hale, 26. Hale, who is transgender, said she was leaving a bar in Hollywood, Florida, with a friend in the early hours one night in July 2015 when a group of people started to yell slurs at her - "faggot," "queer" and "tranny."

As Hale got into her car, a woman from the group ran across the street and began hitting and scratching her, Hale said. A male joined the assault, punching Hale several times in the face.

Hale blacked out. When she regained consciousness, she was covered in blood. The attack left Hale with a fractured nose and three damaged front teeth, hospital and dental records reviewed by Reuters show.

Hale and her friend said the two police officers who responded to the crime failed to pursue the attackers. The perpetrators, they said, were still across the street when police arrived minutes after the attack. Hale's friend, Pettus "Karma" Deerman, videotaped the interaction with the police.

"I'm afraid that I could be murdered."

Payton Hale, assault victim

"This is the cops standing here not doing any fucking thing," Deerman says in the footage. "They wanted to go ahead and sit here and question us because we're transgendered. They weren't worried about the people who victimized my friend right here."

The police report describing the incident paints a different picture. The officers wrote that Hale was "extremely uncooperative." They also said she did not give a clear description of the assailants.

In the footage, Deerman describes the female attacker as wearing "a white and black dress" and having "dark hair" and mentions a male attacker. Hale also tells the officers she was attacked because she was transgender.

In the section of the report that requires police to say whether the officer suspects the crime was "hate / bias motivated," the officer wrote "unknown."

A spokesperson for the Hollywood Police Department cited the police report, which says the officers checked the area for "a male suspect in a white dress," a different description than the one Deerman gives them in the video. The spokesperson said the officers needed more evidence to declare the case a suspected hate crime.

McDevitt, the Northeastern University professor who studies hate crimes, said he has found bias among police officers toward transgender people.

"The transgender community is probably where the gay community was in the 1980s," he said, referring to police bias. "Police are not in many cases receptive. They blame the victim for being transgender and somehow deserving of being attacked."

Hale said her encounter made her lose faith in the police.

"I'm afraid that I could be murdered and the police would literally just kind of brush me away from them," Hale said in an interview, "like it'd be no big deal."

A HATE CRIME OR A ROBBERY?

In Kansas City, the handling of the recent string of murders has unsettled many LGBT people interviewed by Reuters.

"That's how you are able to convict: by the law and based on facts, not assumptions."

Kari Thompson, Kansas City Police Department

On the night he died, Greene told a friend he was going to meet someone to have sex. Before leaving his house, Greene traded texts with Shaw, or his accomplice, that police later said "were in reference to performing sexual acts."

As Greene drove to meet the men who would kill him, he called his best friend and kept him on the phone. Greene thought the 18-year-old was cute, but was nervous about encountering two strangers.

Greene parked on a deserted street and wondered if it was the right address when two men approached the car. Greene kept his cell phone on, so his friend could listen. It was 12:45 a.m.

Greene's voice grew tense, the friend later testified, as Greene, Shaw and Shaw's friend drove off looking for marijuana. At 1:05 a.m., Greene's phone cut off.

Law enforcement officials said Kansas City police deemed the killing "a robbery gone bad" because Greene's cell phone was missing.

During Shaw's trial, prosecutors argued that Shaw and his friend used Greene's homosexuality to lure him to the meeting where he was killed. Shaw's lawyer argued that he was an unwitting accomplice who had no idea his friend planned to rob Greene at gunpoint.

Shaw was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and robbery in May but acquitted of murder. He faces anywhere from probation to 29 years in prison when he is sentenced next month. His friend, who has pleaded not guilty, will be tried for murder in October.

Michael Mansur, a spokesman for the state prosecutor's office in Kansas City, said he could not comment on a pending case. But he said the office took hate crime allegations very seriously.

"We do look to see whether evidence supports filing a hate crime," he said in an email.

Another case that members of the LGBT community in Kansas City say should have been prosecuted as a hate crime is the Christmas Eve 2011 murder of Darnell "Dee Dee" Pearson, a transgender woman. Pearson's killer, Kenyan Jones, shot Pearson after paying her for sex and then learning Pearson was transgender, according to court records.

Jones obtained a gun, hunted down Pearson and shot her at point blank range, the court records said. Convicted of murder but not a hate crime, Jones was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Law enforcement officials said the evidence in the case did not merit a hate crimes prosecution. Friends of Pearson, however, believe she was targeted because she was transgender.

Police are also investigating whether a third killing in Kansas City is a hate crime, as members of the LGBT community contend. Last August, a transgender woman named Tamara Dominguez was run over twice by a truck in a parking lot.

Kansas City law enforcement officials say the safety of the LGBT community is a top priority. After the killings in Orlando, the rainbow flag flew at half staff above the Kansas City state courthouse.

The city, whose population is 69 percent white and 30 percent black, has its first African American police chief. The force includes a diversity unit and a liaison to the LBGT community.

On crime reports, police are required to check a box to indicate whether they believe bias may have played a role. The Kansas City Anti-Violence Program, a local LGBT advocacy group, conducts sensitivity training for local police.

In an interview, Kansas City Police Department spokeswoman Kari Thompson said police comprehensively investigate all attacks against the LGBT community.

"We approach it according to the law. That's how you are able to convict: by the law and based on facts, not assumptions," she said. "We have to make sure we are doing everything the right way."

Star Palmer, a friend of Greene and local LGBT advocate, sees it differently.

"Why is it so hard to prove a hate crime is a hate crime?" she asked.
Editor's note: This article has been modified to correct the size of the increase in the number of people charged with federal hate crimes under the Obama administration and to specify that the Obama administration has brought 33 federal hate crimes prosecutions under the Shepard/Byrd Act.
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Out in the Cold
By Ned Parker and Mimi Dwyer

Data: Mimi Dwyer and Ryan McNeill

Graphics: Christine Chan

Video: Chris Dignam

Edited by David Rohde

Follow Reuters Investigates

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Attacks against LGBT community rarely prosecuted as hate crimes

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KANSAS CITY, Missouri - Dionte Greene, a 22-year-old black gay male, was looking for a hook-up. He reached out to an 18-year-old stranger on Facebook. "I'm not interested in smoking weed with you, Travone," Greene wrote to the teenager, Travone Shaw, in their first exchange.

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The key to solving indifference is acknowledging the struggles of people, and above that advocating and aiding these people. Not everyone has the same quality of life or can achieve the same things in life, purely based on status, race, sexuality, etc. Many times in life, we as people tend to only focus on our struggles, much like being in a first-person view of the world mindset. This can be incredibly damaging as it forces us into a mindset where we cannot think about others and their struggles and help them, which is truly the key to solving indifference.

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Many times I will be walking in my hometown on the main street, whether it be walking to and from work, or just ambling around with my friends, and I walk by a homeless person, as our town has many of them, and fail to acknowledge them or help them in any way. Now of course I don't intentionally do this, however, I think it has been ingrained into my mind by society that this is just what you do as a social rule because homeless people may be dangerous and would just spend that money on drugs. Now even while this may be the case, many times homeless people are just people who have had an unlucky turn of events that pushed them into this far less-than-ideal situation. I think with this matter the things that would help homeless people the most would be lending spare change, as many times they have no source of income and we have a currency-based world, I also think just having a human conversation could really help these folk, as often they are treated than less and are not given the opportunity to have a human connection with someone.

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"Instead of creating communities and environments where every woman can feel safe and free, we can see that, in the absence of proper systemic care and interest for the life and the well-being of girls and women, misogyny and violence emerge from every pore of our society."

Across the world, women feel unsafe, are targeted, and even seen as property and something to use by men. This is ingrained into society and many people fail to see the indifference that is shown to this problem. Worldwide, we are in a time where sexual assaults and rapes are being reported now more than ever, however even when these incidents are reported it is very uncommon that anything actually happens to resolve this issue. We are still in a day and age where it is seen as okay to just say "Well what were you wearing?", and blame it on the girl as if it is her fault. We as a society need to change and recognize what is happening and stand up for these women and girls rather than disregarding the issue, we are all bystanders and it needs to change.

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Глас Против Насилство

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The indifference towards violence against women is concerning and unacceptable - Глас Против Насилство

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“A 19-year-old girl from Kičevo reported a Skopje taxi driver for touching her on her body during the ride”; “Her boyfriend beat her up and shot her”; “A man from Kavadarci beat up his ex-girlfriend and her 6-year-old daughter”; “A 14-year-old girl met a boy on Instagram, he video-recorded her, and then forced her to […]

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"Often, when society is facing a problem that’s terrible but slow-growing, we ignore it."

In our society, many people like to ignore climate change and the effects it's having on our world. We are at a point in time when climate change is more prevalent than ever and is becoming an overbearing issue. However, as it becomes a bigger problem some people just ignore it more. They are indifferent to what is happening. This could be due to multiple factors, like it may worry people, they may want to live their life the best way they feel they can without a feeling of impending doom and to be honest, sometimes it is easier to just ignore it because you think to yourself "oh that's not my issue, someone else will do it". If the 39 million people in Canada all say that, then nothing is getting done. To make this change, we need to spread the message of climate change and take action where we can, like picking up garbage, reducing our carbon footprint, and trying to keep our environment safe and intact.

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Something weird is happening around climate change. Republicans are deciding it's real. Three years ago, only 49 percent of Republicans thought so, but by last December it was 64 percent, as a Monmouth University poll found. That's a huge jump in a short time and is all the more astonishing given that the Republican president and many of his party's politicians pooh-pooh the global emergency. Meanwhile, other parts of the electorate are really freaking out. Last year, the percentage of those who say they're "very worried" about global warming shot up from 21 percent to 29 percent, according to a poll by Yale's and George Mason University's programs on climate change communication.

Those who've studied this shift say it's because of the recent waves of unsettling, climate-related news. The problem is now knocking on everyone's front door: record-breaking heat and cold, ravaging hurricanes, rampaging wildfires in overdry forests. "It's not distant," says Anthony Leiserowitz, head of the Yale program.

There's a phrase I like that describes what's happening, and it helps us grasp what might be next: "peak indifference." It refers to the psychology of problems that become too big to ignore.

Peak indifference is a coinage of the sci-fi writer, blogger, and activist Cory Doctorow (who is, full disclosure, a friend). You can think of it this way: Often, when society is facing a problem that's terrible but slow-growing, we ignore it. We're indifferent to the problem. Climate change isn't the only example (think of digital privacy or income inequality), but it's perhaps the toughest to crack.

The psychologist Robert Gifford once enumerated the "seven dragons of inaction" on climate, from ingrained habits (car culture) to lack of trust (in, say, scientists) to numbness (statistics overload). As the crisis grows, our indifference grows too.

But at some point, a crisis gets so bad that it becomes unignorable. Our indifference reaches a peak, begins to decline-and panic emerges. This could describe what we're now seeing in the climate polling. Media coverage and real-life events have finally broken through to folks: "Increasingly they're saying, 'Wait a minute, this is happening right here, right now,' " Leiserowitz says.

This is great for anyone who wants to fix the problem, yes? Society is finally ready!

But Doctorow's theory also predicts another psychological hazard: When we ignore trouble for so long, we can slip quickly into nihilism. It's too late. We missed our chance to take action.

That means the current political moment is incredibly interesting. Anyone who wants to deal with climate change may have only a brief window to sell the public on a plan. In his new book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, the writer David Wallace-Wells talks about the value of panic to pushing collective action; Doctorow says it's the point "where you divert your energy from convincing people there's a problem to convincing them there's a solution."

This is why the stakes are so high in the debate over the Green New Deal that Democrats recently introduced in Congress. The young environmental activists of the Sunrise Movement flooded DC this winter to push for a resolution. Six Democratic presidential candidates now support it in principle. And the Yale-George Mason survey found 81 percent of all Americans support the general concept, including-remarkably-57 percent of conservative Republicans. Clean energy policy "has a huge social consensus," Leiserowitz notes.

Still, barriers to action loom. More Republicans may believe in climate change, but they don't think it's caused by humans. And the Yale survey question about the Green New Deal was vague and upbeat, and didn't pose the tough-to-sell policy specifics (zero-emission transportation, job guarantees) or financial costs that the public might dislike. And even people terrified about climate change don't always agree on what policies to pursue. But the Sunrise activists, and all of us who want action on this, have to push hard now. It's only when you reach the peak that you can see where you need to go.

Getty Images (Fire and Lawn)

Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99) is a WIRED contributing editor. Write to him at clive@clivethompson.net.

This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.

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We Might Be Reaching 'Peak Indifference' on Climate Change

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Something weird is happening around climate change. Republicans are deciding it's real. Three years ago, only 49 percent of Republicans thought so, but by last December it was 64 percent, as a Monmouth University poll found.

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"Had he been treated properly and seen to timely he would not have died"

Brian Sinclair was an Indigenous man who had been in a hospital ER and was ignored for hours on end because it was assumed that he was drunk and sleeping it off. Over one hundred other patients were seen in this time and he too would have recovered. Indigenous people are constantly affected by indifference as it is intertwined into society that they are seen as lesser, which makes people ignore the issue rather than aiding to resolve it.

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Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City

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Many times as people we tend to ignore those in need of help, whether it be a homeless person, a mother, or a child. As a society, I think we are particularly indifferent to the elderly. Many people don't see the rising issues in the elderly community, or they do and they simply don't care. In the elderly community, there are many issues like unstable income, lack of home care packages, the impact of dementia, homelessness in the elderly community; particularly women, depression, and isolation. An ideal for elderly people would be to live out their lives to the end because it is much more comfortable than needing to uproot their lives and go into old care homes or even onto the street, this is a big problem, especially for women who may have been more dependent on a man's salary, which is non-existent after they die. Many people tend to overlook these members of society, whether it be from ageism or just a general feeling of unimportance towards them. However, these are one of the groups that need help the most, as many times they cannot advocate for themselves due to dementia or disabilities. I think for us to help this group of people we should volunteer in care homes, advocate for dementia research, and above all just have kindness and compassion for these people.

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~ Advocate for others

~ Don't assume somebody else will help them

~ Take action

~ Be aware of the world around you

~ Put yourselves in the shoes of those affected