Beginning last Thursday, student email inboxes have been flooded with alerts from the Department of Public Safety regarding racist and despicable crimes committed on and around Syracuse University’s campus. DPS continues to improperly characterize these racist acts in their communication with the university community.

A number of emails sent to SU students pertaining to recent incidents on campus use the term “bias incident.”

The emails with this subject sent out to the student population at SU deal with issues which are extremely intense and far from harmless. Most importantly, these events reported in the emails are hateful and malicious. To label them as “bias” leads recipients of the email to believe the acts do not severely impact SU’s campus. The racist graffiti, verbal harassment and threatening documents circulating the university stray far from bias. These are acts of hate and must be addressed as such.

The term hate crime is defined by the FBI as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.”

When hate crimes are presented to the student body as mere bias-related incidents, the students understand them as such. By failing to condemn these acts more harshly, the school enables more people to commit these crimes and for recipients of the emails to underestimate the impact they have on those targeted.

DPS continues to employ inadequate rhetoric to convey dangerous hate crimes to students. In order to eliminate hate crimes on campus and deconstruct the racist culture at SU, DPS must accurately label these incidents as what they truly are.

Alex Battaglia is a freshman newspaper and online journalism major. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at abatta02@syr.edu. She can be followed on Twitter at @alex_battaglia.