New WA hotline to report hate crimes launches in three counties

Residents in Clark, King and Spokane counties can now report hate crimes and bias incidents to the non-emergency hotline at 1-855-225-1010 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday

Jake Goldstein-Street
Washington State Standard

Washington has launched a hotline to report hate crimes and bias in three of the state’s biggest counties.

Residents in King, Spokane and Clark counties can now report hate crimes and bias incidents to the non-emergency hotline at 1-855-225-1010 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. This pilot will last 18 months, before Washington expands the hotline statewide in January 2027.

Staff can help callers find support services or assist in reporting incidents to local police. Anyone in the three counties can also report online. If experiencing an active emergency, residents should call 911, not the new hotline.

“Hate crimes not only directly harm individuals but also can instill harm throughout the community,” state Attorney General Nick Brown said in a statement. 

The Legislature created the hotline last year, with mostly Democratic support. 

Oregon established a similar hotline in 2020, and has seen reports steadily rising since then, from about 1,100 in 2020 to more than 5,800 last year. But spam and harassment calls are driving much of that increase, a new report found this month. At the same time, reported incidents declined slightly last year, which officials attributed to waning confidence in the program.

Oregon’s attorney general called the developments a “a sobering gut check and a call to action.”

California’s hotline, implemented in 2023, saw about 1,000 hateful acts reported in the first year.

Most years, Washington sees 500 to 600 hate crime incidents reported to police, according to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. This places Washington consistently in the top five states with the most reports. Hate crimes can be based on race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation or disability, among other protected classes.

For decades, the state’s hate crime statute called such actions “malicious harassment.” But in 2019, amid the rise in these crimes, lawmakers changed the term to the more commonly used “hate crime offense.”

“We took an important step in 2019 by changing our hate crime laws — but the rise in hate and bias incidents shows there’s still more to do,” said Sen. Javier Valdez, D-Seattle, who sponsored last year’s bill creating the hotline. “That’s why this hotline matters. It’s not just about policy — it’s about people. It’s about making sure every victim is heard and supported.”

Since 2019, legislators have made more changes to the hate crime statute, such as specifying the charge as a “crime against persons,” which makes perpetrators subject to supervised release after finishing their sentence. They also removed the requirement for “physical injury” to meet the hate crime threshold. And they took out from the law the term “swastika” in recognition of religious communities that use the symbol Nazis appropriated.

Lawmakers also added property damage as a possible basis for a hate crime.

And later this month, another law, passed this year, will take effect to clarify that bias need not be the only motivation to commit a hate crime. 

Unlike hate crimes, “bias incidents” don’t rise to the level of a crime. Examples of such conduct include insulting language based on someone’s gender, mocking someone with a disability or creating racist drawings.

“When immigrant families in my network face verbal harassment that makes them afraid to send their children to school,” Catalina Velasquez, executive director of the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, said in a statement. “When transgender people of color experience daily microaggressions that chip away at their humanity, when our elders are told to ‘go back where they came from’ — these are acts of violence that shape our material conditions and our ability to exist safely in the world.”

Washington’s state Republican Party called the new hotline a “snitch line” that would be “weaponized against those with viewpoint diversity.”

Beginning in July 2027, the attorney general’s office will publish annual reports on calls the hotline receives.

This report was first published by the Washington State Standard.