Were There Really More Hate Crimes Last Year?
Were There Really More Hate Crimes Last Year?
Or are they just being reported more often?
Did you know that around 7 percent of anti-White hate crimes in the entire United States in 2003 occurred in two tiny cities in Arkansas with a combined population of roughly 8,000 at the time? That’s right, there were a combined 54 anti-White hate crimes reported in Waldron and Lonoke, Arkansas that year and 773 reported in the entire rest of the United States. The 96 anti-White hate crimes reported in Arkansas in 2003 accounted for over 10 percent of the national total (about 10 times Arkansas’ share).
Waldron has not reported another anti-White hate crime since 2003 and Lonoke reported one each in 2004, 2013 and 2018. There were more anti-White hate crimes reported in Arkansas in 2003 than the total reported there over the last 14 years.
I bring up this somewhat absurd example to point out that every discussion of national hate crime should begin and end with the fact that the data is highly suspect when attempting compare year-to-year changes. I wrote about this problem a few years ago for Lawfare, but it is worth reiterating in light of the FBI’s recent release of 2022 hate crime data. Reporting on the subject, however, frequently fails to lead with the unreliability of the data if it is mentioned at all.
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.”
This is extraordinarily difficult when you consider the enormity of this data collection task for law enforcement officers. About half of all 2022 murder victims that were reported to the FBI had either an unknown circumstance or an unknown relationship to their killer. And that’s a crime with a consistently higher clearance rate — when, in theory, something is known about the offender — than most other crimes.
The real question, therefore, is whether increasing hate crimes reflects changing reporting practices or a surge in actual hate crimes nationwide. Because, in aggregate, reported hate crimes are surging.
I tend to think the culprit is changing reporting practices for a few reasons.
First, weird things are still happening, especially in the South. Former Confederate states made up 9 of the 16 states with the lowest rates of reported hate crimes in 2022 including 3 of the bottom 4. These states have reported increased hate crimes over the last few years, but digging under the hood suggests some weirdness is still afoot. That weirdness is likely reflected in lower levels of reported hate crimes in past years.
Reported hate crimes in Louisiana increased from 16.5 on average between 2009 and 2016 to 124 in 2021. A large chunk of 2021’s figures, however, come from 41 hate crimes — including 12 anti-White hate crimes — reported in Marksville (population around 4,900). Those are nearly all of the hate crimes ever reported by Marksville since the FBI began collecting data in 1991 (1 in 1996, 2 in 2022). Many of the state’s largest population areas such as Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Jefferson Parish reported few — if any — hate crimes in 2022 while Tangipahoa Parish (about 3 percent of the state’s population) accounted for nearly 30 percent of the state’s reported hate crimes.
Similarly, Mississippi reported 49 hate crimes in 2017 — up from 0 in 2015 — with Byram (population ~11,600) reporting 31 of them. Byram has reported 8 hate crimes outside of 2017 and all of them have been anti-Physical Disability. Byram’s 31 anti-Physical Disability hate crimes in 2017 accounted for nearly half of all such hate crimes reported nationwide that year.
New Jersey had by far the nation’s highest rate of reported hate crimes in 2022 at 13.1 hate crimes per 100,000 people covered by a reporting agency. That’s nearly double that of the next closest state and 13 times higher than Florida’s reported rate. There were about as many hate crimes reported in New Jersey and New York (population covered about 28 million) in 2022 as there were in the entire former Confederacy (population covered about 100 million).
All this weirdness is suggestive of a reporting consistency problem.
A second reason to believe that the surge in hate crimes reflects changing reporting is how uniform the rise has been across hate crime categories. The below table shows how nearly every hate crime category as defined by the FBI has seen a sizable percent increase over the last few years. It’s not that hate crimes are up against (insert group here), it’s that reported hate crimes are up across the board which may reflect a widespread increase in hate crimes but, at least in my opinion, likely reflects more of a willingness to report hate crimes (either by the victim to the police or by the police to the FBI).
A final reason why I’m a bit skeptical about the trend suggested by the hate crimes is that there are clear examples of surging hate crimes in the United States, but these examples are specifically tied to external events, tend to be short-term changes, and impact only a handful of groups. In other words, an across-the-board increase in hate crimes does not fit the pattern shown by previous increases.
Reported Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim hate crimes increased from 5 in August 2001 to 508 in September 2001, and there was a smaller jump from 33 in November 2015 to 74 in December after Donald Trump called for a shutdown on Muslims entering the US. Similarly, anti-Asian hate crimes surged from 14 in February 2020 to 55 in March 2020 as COVID-19 began to spread wildly in the US.
It certainly is plausible that Americans have become more hateful leading to more hate crimes occurring and being captured in the FBI’s data. It’s also a certainty that recent global developments that may be causing a spike in hate crimes cannot be understood due to the long delay between crimes occurring and the data being reported 9 or 10 months into the following year. It's also possible that people are reporting these incidents to police more than they used to and/or police are more willing to describe incidents as hate crimes.
But people should be skeptical as long as incidents like the May 2022 Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in California — which was immediately publicly identified as a hate crime and led to Federal hate crime charges in May 2023 — don’t show up in hate crimes data.
Digging under the hood of hate crime data produces enough questions to make me think that year-to-year comparisons are probably a bad idea.
I hate the fact that someone thought there needed to be a separate category for "hate" crimes. There, I did it, I committed a hate crime.
Hi Jeff: The question is the accuracy of all federal crime statistics. There should be an attempt to, as you state, to look under the hood of all federal data to place it within a meaningful context. The feds won't do it because it would create disagreements and negative media.
See my thoughts on hate crimes at https://www.crimeinamerica.net/explaining-wildly-divergent-hate-crime-numbers/
In this case, the National Crime Victimization Survey probably provides the more accurate statistics. Per my article:
"The FBI is reporting 10,840 hate crime incidents compared to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 247,000 yearly figure. The difference is so large that it makes an understanding of the problem complex.
For policy matters, it seems that the data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics via a survey is more impactful based on much larger numbers to analyze. Methodology 101, the larger the numbers, the more accurate the results.
Readers need to understand the dynamics of hate crime reports (i.e., reasons for not reporting incidents-crimes committed by someone the victim knows). Numbers can be meaningless without context. Bias statements between friends or associates are likely going to be substantially different in nature when compared to stranger-to-stranger violence.
Settling disputes between people who know each other is often seen as a private matter that does not require police intervention.
According to the Bureau Of Justice Statistics, hate crimes offenders were most likely to be men (72%) and strangers (56%), which means that close to half of the victims knew their offenders (editor’s notes, for context, most violent crime happens between people who know each other).
In the final analysis, federal data on hate crimes seems wildly inconsistent. The US Department of Justice needs to create readable and understandable reports combining FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers and rates plus explanations to make sense of the data. Not doing so leads to misinterpretations or falsehoods.
Based on the two federal sources, one can make any claim they want as to increases (or lack of increases), who’s affected, and victimization based on groups."
We live in a world where reporters and politicians will grab headlines and go with them without "looking under the hood." That doesn't serve us and our understanding of crime.
Best, Len.