Current Events > New FBI hate crimes report undercounts bigotry-based attacks

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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-fbi-hate-crimes-report-undercounts-bigotry-based-attacks-racial-mi-rcna61217

The FBI on Monday released a hate crimes report for 2021 that it admits is incomplete and which, critics say, vastly undercounts bigotry-based attacks on Blacks, Jews, Asians and members of the LGBTQ community. Even so, the 7,262 hate crime incidents tallied in the report is the third-highest number reported in a decade and just a thousand shy of the 8,263 incidents recorded in 2020, according to bureau statistics. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said the reason for the apparent undercount is that the FBI has implemented a new procedure for police departments to report crimes of all kinds to it called the national incident-based reporting system, or NIBRS and many of those departments have not yet started working with the program. According to the FBI, just 65% of police departments nationwide provided it with hate crimes statistics for 2021, compared to the 93% that did so the previous year. Even worse, critics say, the FBI's 2021 hate crimes report is missing key data from big states such as California and Florida where many of these incidents tend to be reported, and from some of the nations largest police jurisdictions, including New York City and Los Angeles. The significant decline in participating police agencies in 2021 due to a transition to a new platform killed the accuracy of national totals," said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Levin, whose own research saw a staggering 224% increase in anti-Asian crimes last year, as well as big increases in bias crimes against Jews, Latinos, Black people and members of the LGBTQ community, said the result is that the new FBI report is an out-of-focus snapshot on what's going on in America. "Todays overall FBI numbers simply do not reflect the increases were seeing across more reliable and consistent data from a smaller but more consistent set of police data," he said. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt echoed that criticism. Hate crimes tear at the fabric of our society and traumatize entire communities, he said. The failure by major states and cities across the country to report hate crime data essentially and inexcusably erases the lived experience of marginalized communities across the country. The FBI acknowledged that the newest hate crimes numbers, culled from 11,834 law enforcement agencies nationwide, were incomplete. As has been the case for many years, most of the "known offenders" cited by the report are overwhelmingly white (56.1%) and most of the victims (64.8%) were targeted because of their race or ethnicity.

Greenblatt said the Jewish community has experienced a major uptick in religious-based attacks in 2021 but the FBI report does not reflect that because it does not include data from the big cities that, historically, have had relatively high numbers of reported anti-Jewish hate crimes. Especially at a time when our communities are feeling particularly vulnerable to hate crimes and extremist-fueled attacks, it is egregious that major cities and states across the country have failed to report comprehensive data for 2021, he said. We urge Congress to make it mandatory for state and local law enforcement agencies that receive federal funding to participate in the FBIs hate crime data collection efforts." Levin's research, which includes data from 18 states and the District of Columbia, recorded 8,896 hate crimes in 2021 and "a wave of anti-Asian violence." We showed a record for anti-Asian hate, but when you leave out New York City, L.A., yeah, and Chicago too, and youre functionally leaving out Florida and California, this is devastating for the data," he told MSNBC's Katy Tur.

The war on terror sure petered out after we found out that most terror attacks in US are committed by white Christian males

That is kinda scary the number is third all time and didnt even include the New York, Florida, California, or Chicago numbers. Where it seemed like hate crimes happened every day there in 2021.