Last December, the FBI issued a report saying hate crimes in the US remained relatively high in 2021, following an unprecedented surge, but cautioned that it was an undercount because thousands of police departments had not yet reported their data. These included major cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as the entire state of California, and Florida.
But on Monday, the FBI released its Supplemental 2021 Hate Crime Statistics report that includes all law enforcement agency hate crime incident reporting. And while the December report on the 2021 hate crime dataset included 7,262 incidents and 8,673 related offenses, the supplemental hate crime dataset reports involve 10,840 incidents and 12,411 related offenses.
A percentage distribution of those 12,411 victims by bias type in 2021 reveals:
- 64.5% of victims were targeted because of the offenders’ race/ethnicity/ancestry bias,
- 15.9% were targeted because of the offenders’ sexual-orientation bias,
- 14.1% were targeted because of the offenders’ religious bias,
- 3.2% were targeted because of the offenders’ gender identity bias,
- 1.4% were targeted because of the offenders’ disability bias,
- 1.0% were targeted because of the offenders’ gender bias.
Of the 8,327 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against persons in the updated 2021 dataset:
- 43.2% were intimidation,
- 35.5% were simple assaults,
- 20.1% were aggravated assaults.
- 19 rapes and 18 murders were reported as hate crimes.
- The remaining 70 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against persons were reported in the category of other.
Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, told the AP: “We are in a unique and disturbing era where hate crimes overall stay elevated for longer, punctuated by broken records.”
Couldn’t put it better myself.
