ARGUMENT: Anti-Asian American crimesWhy There’s Not Much Data on Anti-Asian Violence
The murder of eight people in Atlanta on 16 March, including six Asian women, has brought the issue of an apparent rise in hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans into the national spotlight. Jeff Asher writes that there is some evidence that anti-Asian hate crimes increased in 2020, though national data won’t be fully available for another six months. The reason: data on hate crimes is scarce—and incomplete. “Whether you are building a baseball team, combating a pandemic, or responding to a surge in hate crimes, a prerequisite to effective problem-solving is accurate, comprehensive and timely data,” he writes.
Themurder of eight people in Atlanta on 16 March, including six Asian women, has brought the issue of an apparent rise in hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans into the national spotlight. Earlier this month, Congress reintroduced the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which calls on the Department of Justice to review anti-Asian hate crimes related to the coronavirus pandemic and improve hate crimes reporting. President Biden has called on Congress to pass this legislation swiftly. The call for improved study of hate crimes gets to an important fact: Even as hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans seem to be increasing, little data is available to accurately keep track of these crimes.
Jeff Asher writes in Lawfare that there is some evidence that anti-Asian hate crimes increased in 2020, though national data won’t be fully available for another six months. The reason: data on hate crimes is scarce—and incomplete.
· The best source of data on hate crimes in the United States comes from theFBI’s collection. Under theHate Crimes Statistics Actof 1990, the attorney general is required to collect and report each year on “crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, gender and gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.”
· The FBI’s data is plagued by problems that make analyzing hate crimes trends mostly impossible. The FBI data is better than nothing, but the numbers produced by the bureau each year are not particularly useful for several reasons.
· To begin with, hate crimes data reported by the FBI does not attempt to account for agencies that did not report or reported incomplete data because. Without estimatescounts from the agencies that either did not report or reported incomplete data, it is impossible to build a national estimate of major crimes each year. National hate crimes data is also impossibly delayed.
· Another major challenge with hate crimes data is that collection depends on local law enforcement agencies, and there are 15,588 law enforcement agencies across the country. In 2019, 86 percent of participating agencies didn’t report a single hate crime to the FBI, including at least 71 cities with populations over 100,000.
