Hate Crime Data is Still a Mess but Anti-Jewish Hate Crime Likely Rose in 2023

Time for the annual stroll through hate crimes data.

The FBI’s hate crimes data is a mess. I’ve talked about it several times, and a paragraph from last year’s piece about hate crimes gets to the crux of the issue:

Much of the problem with hate crimes data is that what gets reported is up to the agencies. What constitutes a murder or a motor vehicle theft is clearly defined by the FBI and relates almost entirely to the offense, but hate crimes require a law enforcement agency to deduce the offender’s motive. As the FBI’s hate crimes manual makes clear, “Due to the difficulty of ascertaining the offender’s subjective motivation, bias is to be reported only if investigation reveals sufficient objective facts to lead a reasonable and prudent person to conclude that the offender’s actions were motivated, in whole or in part, by bias.”

Are hate crimes rising because more agencies are reporting, the agencies that are reporting are doing a better job acknowledging incidents, people are more willing to report incidents, or hate crimes are actually increasing? We usually can’t say for sure!

Access to hate crime data through the FBI is actually really good. You can download a CSV with information on every hate crime ever reported on the Crime Data Explorer and play around with it.

Doing so shows the number of hate crimes reported nationally rose slightly in 2023…

While the number of agencies reporting at least one hate crime and the population covered by agencies reporting at least one hate crime fell slightly.

The question always remains as to whether reported hate crimes have actually increased in a given year or if it’s due to a change in reporting patterns — either by the agency or by the reporting population.

There are definitely a ton of weird incidents that stick out from year to year. The city of Flowood, MS (population of around 10,000) reported two hate crimes in 2023. Both were shoplifting incidents with an anti-white bias committed by a while perpetrator.

Go figure.

The city of Natchitoches, LA (population around 17,000) reported one hate crime in 2023, the city’s first since 2015. It was an anti-Buddhist wire fraud hate crime.

Again, go figure.

You also have to remember that the NIBRS transition has increased the number of certain types of offenses that are only supplied via NIBRS. Shoplifting hate crime incidents, like the ones in Flowood, have skyrocketed from 23 in 2013 to 84 in 2023, but that likely just reflects more NIBRS-compliant agencies reporting hate crimes (non-NIBRS agencies don’t specifically collect data on shoplifting incidents).

There are a few times, however, that you see a big change in hate crimes and can likely extrapolate that the change is due to an increase in the number of crimes occurring rather than simply a reporting change. This is clear when charting anti-Muslim offenses (grouped with the phrases anti-Islam and anti-Arab in this case) in September 2001, anti-Black offenses during the summer of 2020, and anti-Jewish offenses starting in October 2023.

The hate crimes data cuts off after December 2023, so the current trend into 2024 isn't known. Judging by what happened during other surges in 2001 and 2020, I would expect that the surge in reported anti-Jewish hate crimes was relatively short lived with offenses reported more frequently than before on the other side of the surge. But we won't know that until a year from now.

Unsurprisingly, most of the rise in anti-Jewish hate crimes were reported in New York City, where a disproportionate share of the US Jewish population lives. Whether increased reporting after the surge would represent more offenses or increased reporting is hard to say. And that's the crux of the challenge with hate crimes data. It's inadvisable to read too much into the top line figures because there is so much uncertainty inherent in the data.

Sometimes there are things to say about hate crime trends, but more often than not the main story of newly released hate crimes data is about the quality of the data itself.