FBI Hate Crimes Data Released
Feature Story by Corrine Yu - 11/4/2002
The FBI has released its annual publication, "Crime in the United States 2001." Since 1996, the Bureau has included a separate section summarizing the HCSA data for the year as part of this report. Highlights from the 2001 hate crime data include the following:- While the overall number of crimes reported to the FBI in 2001 increased slightly (2.1%), reported hate crimes increased dramatically from 8,063 in 2000 to 9,726 in 2001 (a 20.6% increase).
- In 2001, 1,663 more hate crime incidents were reported than in 2000. Racial bias again represented the largest percentage of bias-motivated incidents (44.9%), followed by Ethnic/National Origin Bias (21.6%), Religious Bias (18.8%), Sexual Orientation Bias (14.3%), and Disability Bias (0.3%).
- 1,043 anti-Semitic crimes were reported, a slight decrease from 1,119 in 2000. Overall, crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions comprised 10.7% of all the bias-motivated crimes - and 57% of the religious-based crime incidents.
- The number of reported "anti-Islamic" crimes increased from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001. Since the FBI does not collect statistics on anti-Arab or anti-Sikh hate crimes, we can only assume that this dramatic increase of over 1600% reflects the backlash in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
- The number of national law enforcement agencies reporting to the FBI in 2001 increased slightly from 11,690 to 11,987.
- The five states with the highest numbers of hate crime were: California (2,246 incidents, 23.1% of total reported incidents), New Jersey (767, 7.9%), New York (712, 7.3%), Massachusetts (584, 6.0%), and Michigan (442, 4.5%). These five states comprise 48.8% of all incidents reported in the United States.
- Hawaii was the only state that did not participate in reporting hate crime to the FBI; Alabama participated but reported zero hate crime for the entire year.
