PHILADELPHIA (June 30, 2026) — Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, the DAO DATA Lab and justice partners jointly released a report on Tuesday regarding the limited scope of Pennsylvania’s current Ethnic Intimidation statute (18 Pa.C.S. § 2710), which leaves significant gaps in the identification and protection of victims of hate crime.
The FBI identifies hate crimes as crimes against people or their property that are partially or entirely driven by prejudice against the victim’s race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity. The Commonwealth’s current Ethnic Intimidation statute limits its protections to race, color, religion, and national origin and has not been updated since its creation in 1982. Consequently, it fails to encompass other critical groups, such as those targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or ancestry.
“As we reach the end of National Gun Violence Awareness Month, Pride, and the celebration of Juneteenth, the DAO reinforces its commitment to supporting laws that make our communities safer and freer, while ensuring everyone is represented. In doing so, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office is releasing the No Law for Hate report to coincide with a month that is both celebratory and reflective, highlighting how far we have come and how much further we need to go to continue the fight for safety, equity and justice,” District Attorney Larry Krasner said.
Report’s Recommendations:
- A modern, inclusive hate crimes statute in Pennsylvania would empower the Commonwealth’s district attorneys to charge both the underlying offense and a separate charge characterizing the incident as a hate crime, enhancing the grade of the underlying charge to more accurately reflect the severity of this behavior.
- Expanding the definition of a hate crime in Pennsylvania to include those committed against marginalized identities would enable the DAO to better protect these members of the community and provide more appropriate support earlier in the process.
- Reforms would enable the DAO and other jurisdictions to accurately measure the prevalence of bias-motivated incidents and use that data to better help allocate resources across Pennsylvania, while also allowing victim service coordinators to connect harmed people with appropriate support services more efficiently.
“The findings of this report are straightforward,” said DA Krasner. “Pennsylvania does not have an adequate legal framework for prosecuting hate crimes. Pennsylvania’s only hate crime law, Ethnic Intimidation, has not been updated since 1982…The statute’s reach stops well short of the problem.”
There is currently no database or data marker that can be used to identify crimes motivated by hate on the basis of gender or sexual orientation in Pennsylvania. In order to set a foundation on which to build better protections for Pennsylvania’s victims of hate crimes, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Transparency Analytics (DATA) Lab researched the history of relevant legislation in Pennsylvania, conducted interviews with DAO staff, and analyzed limited existing data. This report describes existing state law and reform efforts, quantifies recent cases brought under the state’s Ethnic Intimidation statute, explores the mechanisms limiting effective prosecution, and offers a look at innovative data tools that could potentially help identify LGBTQ+ victims of hate crimes.
This report draws on state- and city-level arrest and court data from 2014 to 2025, as well as data gathered using the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office’s (DAO’s) LGBTQ+ case identification tool, which automatically flags cases potentially involving LGBTQ+ people based on police report narratives and aims to create a concrete measure of a group that remains largely uncounted and unprotected under Pennsylvania’s current statutes and reporting practices. This report also utilizes interviews conducted with key staff in the DAO to better understand the current use of the Ethnic Intimidation statute and ways that the office supports victims of hate crimes broadly.
Findings from this report show significant challenges in prosecuting hate crimes in Pennsylvania and suggest implications for charging practices, data quality, and crime victim experience. Overall counts of Ethnic Intimidation cases with LGBTQ+ victims identified by the tracker are likely a severe undercounting of hate-motivated crimes occurring in Pennsylvania. This is reinforced by DAO staff interviews highlighting the difficulties of identifying, charging, and prosecuting hate crimes effectively. Interviews also demonstrate how the law prevents DAO staff from adequately supporting victims of bias-motivated crimes, especially LGBTQ+ victims. Taken together, findings underscore the difficulty of measuring and appropriately responding to hate crimes that fall outside of ethnicity-based categories under current Pennsylvania law. This report’s findings also create a strong argument for current efforts at reform.
The DAO Gender and Sexuality Justice Task Force said: “As harmful rhetoric rises around us, the DAO Gender and Sexuality Justice Task Force is grateful the DATA Lab has written such a detailed report on the lack of comprehensive hate crime laws in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. While this Pride month may be coming to an end, the work continues to protect the LGBTQIA+ community in Philadelphia and across Pennsylvania so Queer joy can further flourish throughout our city and Commonwealth.”
DA Krasner added: “We—the legislature, law enforcement, and district attorneys—can and must do better. To get there we will need to work together to pass legislation that reflects the full reality of bias-motivated crime, to train officers to identify and document these offenses accurately, and to ensure that every victim receives the response their case warrants.”