Source: CNN
By Sara Ganim and Chris Welch, CNN
Seattle (CNN)Two years ago, Seattle Police Officer Jim Ritter realized his city had a major problem. People weren’t reporting hate crimes.
He’d hear about them, anecdotally. Some were horrifying incidents. But they weren’t showing up on police reports.
“After determining most of these crimes were being committed in the commercial districts throughout the city, (I) had to sit down and figure out what are we going to do about this,” Ritter said.
He started a program called Safe Place. It’s a first-in-the-nation initiative that designates local businesses as a place where victims of hate crimes can shelter while waiting for the police to arrive.
It’s a simple concept based on something he remembered from his childhood — houses with stickers that signaled to kids walking to school that if something bad happened, they could knock on the door and get help.
Ritter designed a sticker — a police shield with the LGBT rainbow symbolism. It goes on the front of any business agreeing to call police if a victim of a hate crime comes inside looking for help.
Safe Place stickers identify businesses as places where hate crime victims can shelter while waiting for police.
“In this day of communications, everybody just assumes someone else is calling police and we can’t afford to have that happen anymore, neither can these victims,” Ritter said.
Ritter, who is gay, admitted that he never knew so much anti-LGBT crime was going unreported in his own city, where he’d worked as a cop for nearly four decades.
Categories: America, Hate Crime, The Muslim Times, USA