Researchers Say The FBI’s Latest Nationwide Hate Crime Statistics Are Wrong: NPR

The pride flag is reflected in the glasses of a white nationalist who came out to demonstrate at the LGBTQ+ community’s “Pride in the Park” event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho on June 11, 2022.

Jim Urquhart

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Jim Urquhart

The pride flag is reflected in the glasses of a white nationalist who came out to demonstrate at the LGBTQ+ community’s “Pride in the Park” event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho on June 11, 2022.

Jim Urquhart

The FBI recorded a drop in hate crimes in 2021, but the year’s tally may not give an accurate account of hate crimes in the United States, as thousands of law enforcement agencies were missing from the accounts.

The FBI’s annualized data collection from law enforcement identified 7,262 crimes motivated by race, religion, gender or other factors last year. That’s down from 8,263 incidents in 2020. But those numbers offer misleading conclusions because they’re drawn from a pool of 3,255 fewer law enforcement agencies.

Only 11,883 of the county’s 18,812 city, state, municipal and tribal law enforcement agencies sent data to the FBI, down from 15,138 in 2020.

The drop in turnout is due to the transition from an older crime reporting system that had existed in various forms since the 1920s to a more sophisticated reporting system that captures the specific details of a crime. It allows the FBI and researchers to extract deeper analysis from crime statistics. For example, FBI data in 2021 showed that approximately 80% of homicides nationwide were committed with a firearm. This kind of data point would not have been possible with the previous system.

But thousands of law enforcement agencies, including some of the nation’s largest like New York and Los Angeles, have fallen behind in the transition that began in 2016 to the new national incident reporting system ( NIBRS).

Dozens of police departments have found it difficult and expensive to upgrade their old systems, though the Justice Department has helped state and local agencies with more than $120 million in grants. The San Francisco Police Department told The Marshall Project that it does not plan to send data to the FBI until 2025.

In 2021, for the first time, the FBI accepted data exclusively from the new NIBRS system, leading to significant gaps that researchers say render the year’s report meaningless.

In a news release, the Justice Department said “data cannot be reliably compared from year to year” because “several of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies, as well as some states, have not made the transition”. As more law enforcement agencies transition to the new system, the department said it will be able to “provide a richer and more complete picture of hate crimes nationwide.” national”.

But some researchers have questioned the FBI’s ability to capture the true extent of hate crimes in the United States, even when more agencies report their data, arguing that the problem goes deeper than adopting a new technology.

“People don’t typically report crimes to the police. And for hate crimes, many victims may not know they’re a victim of a hate crime,” says Jacob Kaplan, a researcher at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. “So even if 100% of the agencies were reporting all the hate crimes they had committed and trying to really investigate everything, the perceived hate crimes, you’re still going to miss a potentially extremely high number of victims. “

Law enforcement officers arrest 31 members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front on suspicion of conspiring to riot after they were pulled from a U-Haul truck near the city’s ‘Pride in the Park’ event. LGBTQ+ community in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho on June 11, 2022.

Jim Urquhart

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toggle caption

Jim Urquhart

Law enforcement officers arrest 31 members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front on suspicion of conspiring to riot after they were pulled from a U-Haul truck near the city’s ‘Pride in the Park’ event. LGBTQ+ community in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho on June 11, 2022.

Jim Urquhart

The researchers cite the discrepancy between the FBI’s hate crime statistics compared to other data sets, such as the National Crime Victimization Survey reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

“There are 200,000 to 300,000 hate crime incidents in any given year and FBI data records less than 10,000,” says Eaven Holder, author of a peer-reviewed study examining 18 years between both sets of data. “National Crime Victimization Survey estimates suggest that 40-50% of all hate crimes go unreported to police.”

In some cases, there is disagreement among law enforcement agencies about what constitutes a hate crime.

“New Jersey is a pretty good example where in recent years New Jersey has reported a lot more hate crimes than the FBI has agreed to,” Kaplan says.

“Sometimes the FBI and welfare agencies disagree on why, how biased, or disagree that it was a hate crime” , says Kaplan.

For example, in 2021, New Jersey reported 877 anti-Black incidents while the FBI counted 92. The FBI recorded 25 incidents of anti-Jewish crimes in the same year, while New Jersey said there had 298.

New Jersey has reported a 400% increase in bias incidents since 2015, largely due to increases in harassment, a category the FBI does not include.

In some cases, collecting evidence to prove the bias motivating a crime may require more investigative resources than investigating the crime itself.

“For a hate crime to be reported, there must be evidence of bias that plays at least a small role in the crime,” Kaplan notes. “And then the police need to have real evidence, not just like, ‘I think I was the victim of a hate crime.’ They need some kind of evidence to suggest that bias was a motivating factor.”