ASC Division on Terrorism & Bias Crime (DTBC)

During the ASC meetings of 2013 in Atlanta, Gary LaFree first started thinking about a terrorism and bias crimes division for the ASC. LaFree talked about it with colleagues and friends and after kicking around the idea informally, contacted Chris Eskridge in April 2014 to reserve a room for an organizational meeting in San Francisco for the 2014 ASC meetings. Before the meeting, LaFree took Chris’s advice and had a long discussion with Cynthia Lum who provided the by-laws and constitution for the Policing Division—which we used as templates. To meet the requirements of the ASC by-laws, we developed petition sheets and sent them to individuals that we thought would likely be interested. Some of the people who helped us collect names were Laura Dugan, Joshua Freilich, Cynthia Lum, Sue-Ming Yang, Nancy Morris, Bo Jiang, James Forest, John Sawyer and Simon Perry. But there were others as well. We contacted as many people as we could that we thought might be interested in establishing such a division.

As the meeting in San Francisco approached, none of us knew exactly how many people would show up. When we arrived at the meeting we were pleasantly surprised to find that it was standing room only! We estimate as many as 150 people showed up. By then we had plenty of signatures to justify taking our petition for a new division to the ASC board. At this meeting we also established an interim committee to move forward on creating the division. The interim committee included Laura Dugan, James Forrest, Joshua Freilich, Gary LaFree, Carla Lewandowski, Cynthia Lum, and soon William Parkin who agreed to serve as the web-manager for the proposed division’s website. The ASC Board formally approved the ASC Division on Terrorism & Bias Crimes (Current Chair: Erin Kearns) at its Washington D.C. Board meeting in spring 2015. We then had a structure to hold elections and we were off to the races! The DTBC’s elections resulted in its first Executive Board and the first official DTBC ASC meeting occurred in Washington DC in 2015. Once again the meeting was standing room only!

A complete history of the Division on Terrorism & Bias Crimes can be found here: https://ascterrorism.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/History-DTBC-020519.pdf

Join

• New ASC Members should refer to the Divisions section of the membership form.
• Existing ASC Members may add this Division to their current ASC membership as per the member’s membership portal landing page.

Dues

• Active/Retired Member ($15)
• Student Member ($10)

Resources

• Website
• Account Balances & Membership Figures
• Information on donating to the Division on Terrorism & Bias Crimes General Operating Budget