Donald Trump’s presidency and the hate mongering his administration invited into mainstream America certainly has played a role in the number of hate crimes throughout the nation.
The FBI has released 2021 statistics about bias-motivated incidents throughout the nation, including information about the offenses, victims, offenders, and locations of hate crimes.
Law enforcement agencies submitted incident reports involving 7,262 criminal incidents and 8,673 related offenses as being motivated by bias toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity.
Hate crimes seem to have found a home in Missouri, with the FBI reporting a 70% increase in this state.
Wesley Bell, St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, called the report “alarming if not entirely surprising to learn.”
Bell noted that the most common hate target in Missouri is a person’s race, ethnicity, or ancestry.
Many factors help explain this, including economic insecurity, which often leads to scapegoating, and social media, which give hate and bias an open platform,” Bell said.
“More importantly, in recent years we have seen an increasingly vocal and violent pushback against America’s hard-won advances in diversity and inclusion. We have seen and are seeing more open, unapologetic racism and xenophobia.
“Unfortunately, hate and bigotry have a home here, and we all have work to do if we want all people to feel welcome and safe here.”
According to the FBI:
– Slightly more than 7,000 (7,074) single-bias incidents involved 8,753 victims. A percent distribution of victims by bias type shows that 64.8% of victims were targeted because of the offenders’ race/ethnicity/ancestry bias.
– 15.6% were targeted because of the offenders’ sexual-orientation bias, 13.3% were targeted because of the offenders’ religious bias, 3.6% were targeted because of the offenders’ gender identity bias, 1.7% were targeted because of the offenders’ disability bias, and 1.0% were targeted because of the offenders’ gender bias.
– There were 188 multiple-bias hate crime incidents that involved 271 victims.
This is the first year the annual hate crimes statistics are reported entirely through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Compared to the previous crime data collection system, NIBRS collects significantly more detailed data for each individual criminal incident.
According to an FBI statement as of Nov. 22, 2022, 12,090 of the nation’s 18,806 law enforcement agencies have reported crime data using NIBRS. As more agencies transition to the NIBRS data collection with continued support from the Justice Department, “hate crime statistics in coming years will provide a richer and more complete picture of hate crimes nationwide.”
“Since the FBI reported these numbers based on reports to law enforcement, the alarming jump in reports may be a mix of more hate crimes and more reporting of hate crimes. If this alarming increase partly reflects more people coming forward to report hate crimes, then that is one trend we want to encourage. No one should tolerate hate crimes,” Bell said.
Missouri criminal law is also part of the problem, according to Bell, because it “provides limited scope for prosecutors to charge someone for targeting victims because of their “race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or disability.”
Bell wants anyone who has evidence of anyone being targeted for a crime because of those factors to contact his office or law enforcement.
“We can’t stop hate, but [we] will prosecute hate crimes when we have the evidence.”
Locations of Hate Crimes
Law enforcement agencies may specify the location of an offense within a hate crime incident as 1 of 46 location designations. In 2021, most hate crime incidents (32.2%) occurred in or near residences/homes. Nearly 17% (16.9) occurred on highways/roads/alleys/streets/sidewalks, 8.1% occurred at schools/colleges, 7.0% happened at parking/drop lots/garages, 2.8% took place in restaurants, and 2.7% occurred at parks/playgrounds. The location was reported as other/unknown for 4.2% of hate crime incidents. The remaining 26.1% of hate crime incidents took place in the remaining specified location categories or in multiple locations.
Since 2016, the Department of Justice has worked with law enforcement agencies to assist in their transition to reporting crime data through NIBRS, including allocating over $120 million in grants to support agencies’ transition.
The FBI calls it “a significant shift and improvement in how reported crime is measured and estimated by the federal government and will greatly improve the nation’s understanding of crime and public safety.”
