Headlines and Excerpts:
“Hate crimes remain at heightened levels, FBI report finds” by Devan Cole and Josh Campbell, CNN November 12, 2019
“Heidi Beirich, who heads the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, blamed President Donald Trump in the wake of the new report, saying, "Hateful and inflammatory rhetoric from the current presidential administration continues to normalize the beliefs that motivate these crimes," adding that "it is no coincidence that we continue to see a rise in hate crimes under this president."
“Hate-Crime Violence Hits 16-Year High, F.B.I. Reports” by Adeel Hassan/ New York Times November 12, 2019
“Personal attacks motivated by bias or prejudice reached a 16-year high in 2018, the F.B.I. said Tuesday, with a significant upswing in violence against Latinos outpacing a drop in assaults targeting Muslims and Arab-Americans…while crimes against property were down, physical assaults against people were up, accounting for 61 percent of the 7,120 incidents classified as hate crimes by law enforcement officials nationwide.”
The Actual FBI Data
Let’s start with a 2017-2018 comparison of hate crime incidents broken down by offense category:
Per the above chart, crimes against persons were involved in around 61% of hate crime incidents in 2018. But crimes against persons is not the same thing as “physical assaults against people”, because the category of crimes against persons includes “intimidation”, which the FBI defines as “to unlawfully place another person in reasonable fear of bodily harm through the use of threatening words and/or other conduct, but without displaying a weapon or subjecting the victim to actual physical attack” (my italics). In other words, intimidation is a type of verbal, not physical, assault. The other crimes against persons do indeed involve physical assaults. Of these, there were 249 more in 2018 than in 2017, representing 36% of total reported hate crime incidents in 2018 and 32% of the total in 2017.
As for the Southern Poverty Law Center quote, Heidi Beirich is simply wrong: the US is not continuing to see a rise in hate crimes during the Trump administration. Just look at the numbers.
How about the increase in hate crime violence against Latinos? Assuming “violence” means physical attacks - that is, the FBI’s category of crimes against persons, minus intimidation - anti-Latino bias motivation was a factor in 331 violent incidents in 2018, compared to 230 such incidents in 2017. So, yes, there was an increase in violence against Latinos in 2018.
The most common hate crime bias motivations are, in order: anti-African American, anti-sexual orientation, anti-Jewish, anti-white, anti-Latino, and anti-Islamic. Per the following table, the bias mix shifted in 2018:
Who is committing all these hate crimes*? I have a table for that:
So what can we say about trends in US hate crimes? Not much. The differences between 2017 and 2018 are too small to draw firm conclusions. And comparisons with the Obama years are problematic, in part because fewer law enforcement agencies participated in the FBI’s hate crime data system pre-Trump. Plus there’s the challenge of disentangling trends in victim reporting and law enforcement from trends in actual crimes. Per the California Department of Justice, the following factors may influence the volume of hate crimes reported to the DOJ:
Cultural practices of individuals and their likeliness to report hate crimes to law enforcement agencies.
Strength and investigative emphasis of law enforcement agencies.
Policies of law enforcement agencies.
Community policing policies.
Bottom line: Journalists and partisans may spin the numbers, but the rest of us should exercise caution when comparing hate crime statistics across time.
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* Note that “crimes” refers to offenses, not incidents.
Links:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/topic-pages/tables/table-2.xls
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2018/topic-pages/tables/table-2.xls