Hate crimesMany hate crimes never make it into the FBI’s database
The FBI’s latest numbers showed a 17 percent increase in reported hate crimes in 2017. But what does this actually say about the actual number of hate crimes occurring in the U.S.? Not much. The Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 mandates that the FBI publish statistics specifically for crimes motivated by bias, and a broad network of state laws require that hate crimes are both tracked and prosecuted. Despite this, a variety of problems plague the implementation of these laws.
The FBI’s latest numbers showed a 17 percent increase in reported hate crimes in 2017.
But what does this actually say about the actual number of hate crimes occurring in the U.S.? Not much.
The Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 mandates that the FBI publish statistics specifically for crimes motivated by bias, and a broad network of state laws require that hate crimes are both tracked and prosecuted. Despite this, a variety of problems plague the implementation of these laws.
A total of 16,149 law enforcement agencies reported 7,175 incidents of hate crimes to the FBI in 2017. That means that 87.4 percent of law enforcement agencies reported zero bias-motivated crimes.
On the surface, this number seems suspiciously low, particularly when considering that the other federal survey of hate crimes, the National Crime Victimization Survey, which looks at how many people say they’ve experienced a hate crime, estimates that “U.S. residents experienced an average of 250,000 hate crime victimizations each year from 2004 to 2015.” There remains an enormous discrepancy between what victims report as a hate crime and what law enforcement agencies do.
The FBI numbers appear even more suspicious in light of the fact that, as the Arab American Institute points out, several high-profile hate crimes are not in the data. For example, Kansas reported no hate crimes for 2017, despite the murder of Indian immigrant Srinivas Kuchibhotla. Adam Purinton reportedly yelled, “Get out of my country,” before shooting and killing Kuchibhotla and wounding two others in an Olathe, Kansas bar. Purinton was caught hours later in Missouri after telling a bartender at an Applebee’s that he’d shot two “Iranians” and needed a place to hide.
Why are hate crimes underreported?
Since 2016, the investigative journalism organization ProPublica has created a national network of news organizations to document hate crimes. The Documenting Hate Project recognizes that “There is simply no reliable national data on hate crimes.”
