Reported Hate Crimes Likely Fell in 2025

May 04, 2026

The FBI’s switch to monthly reporting means that we don’t have to wait nine months to analyze our nation’s crime trends. So, while the FBI will put out a formal report on hate crimes, the monthly data gives us sufficient evidence so far to say with decent confidence that reported hate crimes in the United States are falling.

I’ll reiterate the disclaimer though that this assessment is based on monthly reporting that isn’t all there just yet. There is still time for more reporting and nothing is finalized, so these numbers should all be taken with a grain of salt (in addition to the grain of salt you should always take with hate crime data)!

With the enormous disclaimer out of the way, I’ll remind you that I’ve written a bunch about hate crime data before. It’s a badly underreported dataset which frequently reflects changes in reporting patterns — from victims or from law enforcement. See my complaining here, here, and here.

Ironically, the FBI’s hate crimes data is one of the easiest to access datasets that the FBI produces. You download a spreadsheet in CSV format and it has thousands of incidents with each row describing what happened in each incident. To get at 2025 data, however, you have to use the hate crimes master files, a process that is much easier with help from my buddy Claude.

But remember, changes in hate crimes can be due to more of them happening, people deciding to report more frequently, or law enforcement changing what they classify as a hate crime (or all three).

To highlight just how varied reporting can be, there were 50 hate crimes in 2024 with a location of “Cyberspace” that were reported by agencies in New Jersey and 108 such offenses in the rest of the country. Teaneck Township, NJ (population ~42,000) had as many such offenses as were reported in California, New York, and Texas combined (8). (As an aside, in 2020 there was an anti-Asian simple assault that took place over cyberspace reported by the FBI in Seattle that I’d love to learn more about).

These figures stabilized a bit more as more states started reporting cyberspace-based hate crimes in 2025. New Jersey fell from 50 to 41 such hate crimes while Vermont’s tiny population and 3 cyberspace-based hate crimes gave it the highest rate in the nation last year (unofficially of course).

There are more eccentric findings in each year’s data.

Half of the nation’s four wire fraud hate crimes in 2024, for example, were reported in Estill, North Carolina (population 1,770). Estill also reported a pair of “False Pretenses/Swindle/Confidence Game” hate crimes which is half as many as Las Vegas (the nation’s leader in such hate crimes).

Malden, MA (population ~66,000) had the nation’s highest rate of reported hate crimes in 2025 — agencies with a population of 10,000 or more. Malden’s 66 reported hate crimes were more than the total reported by 11 agencies with 1 million or more people which speaks more to the paucity of reporting than an overabundance of hate. Anyhow, of Malden’s 66 hate crimes, 46 were theft-related offenses classified as Anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender.

Taken at face value, reported hate crimes likely fell in 2025 though the degree of the decline may lessen as more data becomes available.

Of course, hopefully the preceding few paragraphs have established that a decline in reported hate crimes does not inherently mean a decline in those crimes actually occurring. I’m usually skeptical about the overall changes in hate crimes reported in a given year due to the aforementioned reporting issues. That said, I do think the hate crimes data is good at showing how hate crimes against particular groups surge in response to external events.

The below graph shows this phenomenon pretty well with surging anti-Islamic and Arab hate crimes in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, a sizable increase in anti-Asian hate crimes after COVID, and a surge in anti-black hate crimes after the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests. Note that I’ve cut these graphs off after September 2025 to lessen any potential underreporting of the last two months of the year.

I wrote a while ago how reported anti-Jewish hate crime rose in 2023 and that trend of elevated anti-Jewish hate crimes peaked in 2024 before falling sharply (though still higher than before) in 2025. Showing anti-Jewish hate crimes by rolling over 12 months shows how the trend began in October 2023 and has peaked. There were fewer than 100 reported anti-Jewish hate crimes in December 2024, the fewest since August 2023.

Ultimately, reported hate crimes likely falling nationally for the first time since 2018 is good to see, but the problems with hate crimes data makes any real conclusions impossible to reach. Are hate crimes falling because fewer people are reporting them, there are fewer crimes, or a mix of both? Sadly, it’s simply impossible to say for sure.

New on the Jeff-alytics Podcast

What happens when the people shaping national crime policy don’t actually have the data they need? In this episode, I sit down with Rachel Harmon, law professor at the University of Virginia who previously served as a senior policy adviser for criminal justice for the White House Domestic Policy Council.

Give this terrific episode a listen below!