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Almost a fourth of our 2010 civil rights caseload involved crimes motivated by a particular bias against the victim.”
– Eric Thomas, chief of the FBI’s Civil Rights Unit in Washington, DC
Today the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released its Hate Crime Statistics report for 2010. In what I suppose we can say is “good news,” the data reported by the Bureau’s law enforcement partners remained consistent with 2009 statistics. By the numbers:
The hate crimes report is fairly reflective of the country—agencies that participated in the Uniform Crime Reporting Hate Crime Statistics Program effort in 2010 represented more than 285 million people, or 92.3 percent of the nation’s population, and their jurisdictions covered 49 states and the District of Columbia. Of the 14,977 agencies that submitted data, 1,949 reported that hate crime incidents had occurred in their jurisdictions.
Law enforcement reported 8,208 victims of hate crimes—a “victim” can be an individual, a business, an institution, or society as a whole.- Of the 6,628 hate crime incidents reported to us for 2010, nearly all (6,624) involved a single bias—47.3 percent of the single-bias incidents were motivated by race; 20 percent by religion; 19.3 by sexual orientation; 12.8 percent by an ethnicity/national origin bias; and 0.6 by physical or mental disability.
- As a result of the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crime Prevention Act, the FBI is implementing changes to collect additional data for crimes motivated by a bias against a particular gender or gender identity, as well as for hate crimes committed by or directed against juveniles.
- A reported 4,824 offenses were crimes against persons—intimidation accounted for 46.2 percent of these offenses; simple assault for 34.8 percent; and aggravated assault for 18.4 percent.
- There were 2,861 reported offenses of crimes against property—the majority (81.1 percent) were acts of destruction/damage/vandalism.
- Of the 6,008 known offenders, 58.6 were white and 18.4 percent were black.
- 31.4 percent of reported hate crime incidents took place in or near homes.
As noted, there is still no data on anti-trans bias crimes in the report, but gender and gender identity is slated to be tracked due to the Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
Digging down into some of the data (access it here):
By bias motivation
An analysis of data for victims of single-bias hate crime incidents showed that:
- 48.2 percent were victims of an offender’s bias against a race.
- 18.9 percent were victims of an offender’s bias against a religion.
- 18.6 percent were victims of an offender’s bias against a particular sexual orientation.
- 13.7 percent were victims of an offender’s bias against an ethnicity/national origin.
- 0.6 percent were victims of an offender’s bias against a disability.
Racial bias
Among the single-bias hate crime incidents in 2010, there were 3,949 victims of racially motivated hate crime. A closer examination of these victim data showed that:
- 70.0 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-black bias.
- 17.7 percent were victims of an anti-white bias.
- 5.1 percent were victims of an anti-Asian/Pacific Islander bias.
- 1.2 percent were victims of an anti-American Indian/Alaskan Native bias.
- 6.0 percent were victims of a bias against a group of individuals in which more than one race was represented (anti-multiple races, group).
Religious bias
Of the 1,552 victims of an anti-religion hate crime:
- 67.0 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
- 12.7 percent were victims of an anti-Islamic bias.
- 4.2 percent were victims of an anti-Catholic bias.
- 3.0 percent were victims of an anti-Protestant bias.
- 0.5 percent were victims of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
- 9.1 percent were victims of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion).
- 3.5 percent were victims of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).
Sexual-orientation bias
Of the 1,528 victims targeted due to an offender’s sexual-orientation bias:
- 57.3 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-male homosexual bias.
- 27.5 percent were victims of an anti-homosexual bias.
- 11.8 percent were victims of an anti-female homosexual bias.
- 1.4 percent were victims of an anti-heterosexual bias.
- 1.9 percent were victims of an anti-bisexual bias.
Ethnicity/national origin bias
Hate crimes motivated by the offender’s bias toward a particular ethnicity/national origin were directed at 1,122 victims. Of these victims:
- 66.6 percent were targeted because of an anti-Hispanic bias.
- 33.4 percent were victimized because of a bias against other ethnicities/national origins.
3 Comments
I would be cautious about too much comparison between different years of this report:
Caution to users
Valid assessments about crime, including hate crime, are possible only with careful study and analysis of the various conditions affecting each local law enforcement jurisdiction. (See Variables Affecting Crime.) In addition, some data in this publication may not be comparable to those in prior editions of Hate Crime Statistics because of differing levels of participation from year to year.
Source: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2010/resources/hate-crime-2010-methodology
Also, considering the large number of non-reporting agencies (some of which deal with populations in the hundreds of thousands), I’d assume that this is a significant under-representation of actual bias incidents; The following is probably the best summary table showing this: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2010/tables/table-12-agency-hate-crime-reporting-by-state-2010.xls Note that in Texas, under 7% of agencies reported bias incidents, in Georgia, under 2% of agencies reported bias incidents, whereas in New Jersey, over 33% did. Perhaps New Jersey actually has a lot more bias incidents per population than either Texas (over 8-fold) or Georgia (over 27-fold), but I suspect that it’s more that a larger percentage of New Jersey bias incidents are reported as such.
Otherwise, with 0.00009473 incidents/person, be should crown Washington D.C. as the bias capitol of the U.S.A, with South Dakota, New Jersey, Kentucky, then Massachusetts rounding out the top 5 (in that order).
That said, this is often the best nation-wide report we have.
Wait, so there is a statistically significant number of “anti-heterosexual” hate crimes? This is the first time I’ve ever heard that.
I wonder what those tend to look like? Where they tend to happen, what kind of people beyond “heterosexual” tend to be the victims and what kind of people beyond “non-heterosexual” tend to be the perpetrators?
And I wonder what portion of those “anti-heterosexual” hate crimes are classified as such due to the anti-LGB prejudices of law enforcement people?
And I wonder how under-reported genuine anti-heterosexual hate crimes are?
There were 21 in 2010 that were reported. Were this a statistical survey, they likely wouldn’t be statistically significant. However, these are based on all incident reports given to them about bias incidents from participating forces.
If you look at table 4, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2010/tables/table-4-offenses-offense-type-by-bias-motivation-2010.xls you’ll see what the crimes are (vandalism and simple assault are the most common ones). I don’t know that I can answer your other questions.