NEW YORK - In the collective mind of Brooklyn's Bangladeshi community, there's little doubt that the killings of Mizanur Rahman and Mohammed Hossain were motivated by religious and ethnic hatred.
Both men, killed three months apart this year, were attacked by several Hispanics who pounded them ferociously with wooden clubs but stole nothing.
Rahman's attackers also used chair legs and bamboo sticks to beat him. Hossain's killers, after hitting him repeatedly with a baseball bat, stabbed him several times.
If those incidents weren't proof of rising animosity toward Asian-American Muslims, community leaders say, another beating two weeks after Hossain's death was.
On Nov. 24, Abdul Muhit, who immigrated to Brooklyn from Bangladesh eight years ago, was jumped by two Hispanic men a few blocks from where Rahman was slain.
In an attack lasting about three minutes, Muhit said, his glasses were smashed into his face, leaving shards of glass in his eyes, and his nose was split open, but nothing was stolen.
Police, though, say there are too many unknowns to call any of the three attacks hate crimes, highlighting what special interest groups say is the weakness of the 1990 federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act.
The idea behind the act was that local law enforcement officials could better stem such crime if they knew where it was occurring and who most of the perpetrators and victims were.
But although the act requires the Department of Justice to compile an annual record of hate crimes nationwide, critics say the numbers are far from accurate because local law enforcement agencies are not required to submit reports and because police use wide discretion in determining what is a hate crime.
Religious, ethnic and gay organizations say factors from victims' fears of reporting such crimes to police indifference in pursuing them add to the problem.
The hate crimes report for 2001, released by the FBI on Nov. 25, cited a 17 percent increase over 2000 in such crimes. That included an alarming 1,600 percent increase over 2000 in attacks on individuals, businesses or organizations identified with Islam, a jump attributed to post-Sept. 11 bias.
But if the FBI reports are to be accepted without question, for example, Alabama would be the most tolerant state in the nation. It has never reported a hate crime, not even in 1999 when two men, angry over unwanted advances from a gay man, Billy Jack Gaither, beat him to death with an ax handle and threw his body onto a pile of burning tires.
Critics say that because local agencies are not required to report hate crimes to federal officials, many authorities neglect to do so, which results in federal data full of "false zero" reports, such as Alabama's.
Of nearly 12,000 local agencies - from police forces to hospitals and universities - that volunteered statistics for last year's FBI survey, only 2,106 reported any hate crimes.
The apparent reluctance of local police to label incidents as hate crimes discourages victims from going to police because they believe nothing will be done, said Krittika Ghosh of the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
In addition to victims' beliefs that police will not help them, she said, some immigrants fear they will be reported for immigration violations if they come forward.
Police agencies across the country have comparable standards for classifying hate crimes, resulting in similar disputes between law enforcement and victims' families.
On Sept. 15, 2001, for example, Adel Karas, an Egyptian immigrant, was shot to death in San Gabriel, Calif., by assailants who stole nothing. Relatives were convinced the shooting was a hate crime, but police said there was insufficient evidence.
On Sept. 17, 2001, a Yemeni, Ali Almansoop, was shot to death in his home in Detroit. The man arrested for the murder told police he was angry at Almansoop over the terrorist attacks. However, he was also jealous because Almansoop was seeing his ex-girlfriend. For that reason, police did not classify the slaying as a hate crime.
Tina Susman is a reporter for Newsday, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.