The FBI released its 2017 Hate Crime Statistics report a couple days ago. The report was covered by a bunch of news outlets, but the stories were mostly a rehash of the FBI’s relatively short press release. Few reporters dived into the detailed data tables that accompanied the report. I found none that compared the 2017 data to the previous year’s numbers. But I did.
Why? Because there’s been a lot of press about how Trump has been fanning the flames of racial and ethnic hatred and I wanted to see if there had been an increase in hate crimes since he took office. Here is part of what I found:
What’s with the “adjusted” change? It turns out that the population covered in 2017 is almost 6% larger than what was covered in 2016, because more law enforcement agencies reported to the FBI in 2017 than in 2016. You gotta adjust for that.
What conclusions can we draw? That anti-Jewish and anti-Black hate crimes do seem to be rising. But the absolute numbers aren’t all that big so we should avoid overstating their significance.