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Friend, The FBI released its annual report on hate crime statistics 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), 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. “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 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). 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. In solidarity, Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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