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FBI report warns of rise in hate crimes

According to the FBI, these types of crimes increased by almost 12% compared to 2020.

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Published by
Rosana Rábago Sainz

A new FBI report states that hate crimes increased in 2021. According to the analysis published by the federal agency, this type of crime increased by 11.6% compared to 2020. The updated data differs significantly from what was previously reported by the government agency when it released the report in December 2022.

Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics 2021 by VozMedia on Scribd

At the time, the FBI claimed that hate crimes had dropped to 7,262, a figure well below what was reported in 2020 when there were 8,190 hate crimes on record. However, even then, the government organization and the Department of Justice claimed that the data was not entirely accurate. The Justice Department explained that law enforcement agencies were becoming less cooperative with the report. They went from receiving data from 15,138 police departments in 2021 to only 11,834 in 2022. This prevented the numbers from being compared to other years.

The updated report now allows this data to be compared. The first conclusion to be drawn is that hate crimes increased from 8,190 in 2020 to 9,065 in 2021.

Most of these crimes, 64.5%, are related to racial, ethnic, or ancestry bias. This is followed by attacks related to one's sexual orientation (15.9%); religion (14.1%), gender identity (3.2%), disability (1.4%), and gender (1%).

African-Americans are the main victims of hate crimes

The Department of Justice confirmed that African-Americans were victims of the highest percentage of race, ethnical, or ancestral-related hate crimes at 63.2% in 2021. On the other hand, 4.3% of hate crimes targeted the Asian population while 6.1% targeted Hispanics and Latinos. White people were victims of 13.4% of these hate crimes.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a press release that this report helps both the Department of Justice and the FBI to prevent hate crimes, one of the main objectives shared by both institutions:

Preventing, investigating, and prosecuting hate crimes are top priorities for the Justice Department, and reporting is key to each of those priorities. The FBI’s supplemental report demonstrates our unwavering commitment to work with our state and local partners to increase reporting and provide a more complete picture of hate crimes nationwide. We will not stop here: We are continuing to work with state and local law enforcement agencies across the country to increase the reporting of hate crime statistics to the FBI. Hate crimes and the devastation they cause communities to have no place in this country. The Justice Department is committed to every tool and resource at our disposal to combat bias-motivated violence in all its forms.
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