No Law for Hate: The Case for Expanding Pennsylvania’s Ethnic Intimidation Statute

Pennsylvania’s hate crime law, the Ethnic Intimidation statute, has not been updated since 1982. It does not include sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability. No Law for Hate, a report from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Transparency Analytics (DATA) Lab, traces the troubled history of hate crime legislation in Pennsylvania, examines the nature of Ethnic Intimidation prosecutions across the Commonwealth, provides insight into crimes with LGBTQ+ victims, and advocates for the passage of House Bills 1902 and 1905, which would modernize Pennsylvania’s hate crime framework and require statewide police training on identifying and reporting these crimes. Using state and city court data from 2014 to 2025, the DAO’s own automated LGBTQ+ case-identification tool, and interviews with Philadelphia prosecutors and victim service specialists, the report shows how the statute’s narrow scope leaves whole categories of victims, particularly LGBTQ+ people, without legal recognition or reliable connection to support services. ADAs and victim service specialists describe what this looks like in practice, and share how an expanded statute would give them the tools to charge these crimes appropriately, support victims earlier, and capture data on a problem that currently goes largely unmeasured.