Hate crimes rising, says FBI report

The biggest increase in hate crimes occurred against Muslim Americans.

HATE CRIMES are becoming more commonplace, according to a report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The number of hate crimes committed in the U.S. rose in 2016 for the second consecutive year, with African Americans, Jews and Muslims targeted in many of the incidents, the FBI said on Nov. 13 in its annual report.

There were 6,121 hate crime incidents recorded last year, an almost 5 percent rise from 2015 and a 10 percent increase from 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Hate Crimes Statistics report said. The report did not give a reason for the rise.

The increase in hate crimes is not news for people of color. Unfortunately, for POC, it has become a fact of life. More than half of the reported incidents was related to race. 

Corey Saylor, a spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) who focuses on Islamophobia, said the results "confirms everything we've already known ... Hate crimes went up."

“The FBI’s hate crimes statistics underline that violence has become a fact of life for our communities,” said Suman Raghunathan, executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT).

Hate crimes against Asian/Americans have become so prevalent that several agencies created their own websites have been established to keep track on those incidents of hate because law enforcement agencies don't do a good job keeping tabs on the AAPI community.

READ the entire Hate Crimes Report.

Since the 2016 US election, in its own survey, SAALT has documented over 205 incidents of hate violence aimed at South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Arab, and Middle Eastern Americans, a 58% increase from the previous year.

African/Americans were targeted in about half the 3,489 incidents based on race, ethnicity or ancestry, the FBI report said, followed by whites, who were targeted in 720. Hate crimes against AAPI people made up 3.3 percent of the recorded incidents.

About half the 1,273 incidents that involved religion were against Jews. Muslims were targeted in 307 religion-based crimes, up 19 percent from 2015 and double the number in 2014.

There were 1,076 incidents involving lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people, with almost two-thirds of those targeting gay men.

AAPI individuals were responsible for less than 1% of the hate incidents, according to the report, while 2,671 (46.3 percent) of all known perpetrators were white. The number does not include the 18.1 percent of offenders whose races were either unknown or unreported by law enforcement agencies. Black and Latinx people accounted for 26.1 percent and 5.9 percent of offenders, respectively. Indigenous people made up less than 1%.

The rise of white supremacists coincides with the election of Donald Trump and the rise in hate crimes.
Whites commit most of the hate crimes.

What is even more disheartening, the FBI numbers are most certainly an undercount. The FBI report is based on data that is voluntarily collected and shared by 15,000 law enforcement agencies. Thousands more agencies don't even bother to collect that data. Five states - Wyoming, Indiana, Arkansas, Georgia and South Carolina don't even have hate statutes. Hawaii didn't submit any data for this report. More than 80 cities with more than 100,000 residents reported no hate crimes or simply ignored the FBI's request for data.

The data doesn't reflect all the incidents spurred by hate. In order for an incident to be called a hate crime, a crime actually has to be committed. Thus, the white supremacist rally prior to the march in Charlottesville earlier this year was not a crime. Chanting "Jews will not replace us" and carrying tiki torches is not a crime. Free speech is protected by the First Amendment.

The report doesn't count all the bullying incidents that occur on school grounds because no crime has been committed. In most cases, schools would just list it as a school yard incident if no one is physically hurt.

The results are the most comprehensive for 2016, a year which saw the Trump campaign - which ran on a nativist, anti-immigration platform - triumph over Hillary Clinton in what many called the biggest political upset in modern US history.

“The significant increase [in hate crimes] over the last two years coincides with Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic campaign and its immediate aftermath. We reported a surge in hate crimes and other bias-related incidents—many of them carried out in Trump’s name—in the days after the election,” the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a statement.

The words of our political leaders have consequences, continued the SPLC statement. "President Trump has energized the radical right with his xenophobic rhetoric and has given bigots a license to act on their worst instincts. The most vulnerable people in our country are paying the price."

____________________________________________________________________________