Friend,
The FBI released its annual report on hate crime statistics
[link removed]
this week. But the latest numbers fail to capture the scope of the
problem even more miserably than in previous years.
The report, mandated under the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990
(HCSA)
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, is compiled from the voluntary submissions of the 18,000 federal,
state, university, city and tribal law enforcement agencies across the
country. The numbers are aggregated by states, cities, counties, and
colleges and universities.
Yet this year, especially, very little reliable data can be found on
the full range of hate crimes against people - based on their
race/ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender and
gender identity.
For the past 30 years, the FBI has released its hate crime report in
the fall. And because the agency has integrated hate crime reporting
into its overall Uniform Crime Reporting system (UCR) since 1991, the
report can usually be compared to other crime data to analyze national
trends.
Yet from the very beginning, the report has been far from
comprehensive.
The voluntary nature of the program has resulted in reporting that has
been consistently inconsistent. For example, about 3,500 agencies did
not report any data to the FBI in the 2020 report - including 10
cities with populations over 100,000. And another 60 police
departments in cities with populations over 100,000 affirmatively
reported zero hate crimes
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.
"Some jurisdictions fail to report hate crime statistics, while
others claim there are no hate crimes in their community - a
fact that would be welcome, if true," FBI Director Christopher
Wray said
[link removed]
at a congressional hearing last month.
The 2021 HCSA data is even more drastically incomplete than previous
years' data, to the extent that any comparisons between last
year and previous years are almost meaningless.
The lack of compliance by law enforcement agencies is more significant
than in past years because 2021 was the first year that the FBI
required every agency to report all crime, including hate crimes,
through its National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)
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.
Although the FBI set out a five-year timeline and provided technical
assistance and funding for the transition, many jurisdictions were
either unable or unwilling to report through the new system. This
breakdown has resulted in dramatically incomplete reporting: There are
3,300 fewer participating agencies than in 2020, including agencies in
New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix and, essentially, the
entire states of Florida and California. Ninety million fewer
Americans than in 2020 are covered in the 2021 report.
READ MORE
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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