At face value, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's 2013 Hate Crime Statistics report, released Monday, shows a significant annual decline in bias-based offenses. In 2013 there were 5,928 hate crime incidents reported to the FBI, down from 6,573 in 2012.
Unfortunately, this FBI data does not necessarily mean that there are fewer hate crimes in the U.S.
For one, the FBI gets its numbers from other law enforcement agencies participating in its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. The UCR Program tracks violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) as well as property crimes (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson.) Participating law enforcement agencies voluntarily tell the FBI how many of these crimes have been reported in their jurisdictions.
In 2013, 18,415 "city, county, state, tribal, campus, and federal" law enforcement agencies participated in UCR, the FBI says. But only 15,016 of these law enforcement agencies reported hate crime data to the FBI in 2013—meaning the bureau's hate crime information is far from complete. An FBI spokesman tells Newsweek Hawaii and Puerto Rico didn't submit any hate crime data for 2013.
The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) gives a more damning account of hate crime in America. According to its most recent hate crime report, which uses data from 2012, there were some 293,800 "nonfatal violent and property hate crime victimizations" in the U.S." The bureau says this number is "not statistically different from 2004," during which their statisticians tallied 281,700. In addition, the BJS reports that some 60 percent of those hate crimes went unreported. The big discrepancy in these numbers stems from how they are gathered. FBI data are based on police reports. BJS data are based on yearly interviews of some 160,000 people in 90,000 U.S. households. The findings from this survey group are then extrapolated to the rest of the population.
Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center and editor-in-chief of its journal, Intelligence Report, says the FBI numbers "don't tell us much of anything at all."
Still, Potok says this isn't a criticism of the FBI.
Because UCR numbers come from local law enforcement agencies voluntary submissions, it's effectively up to them to ensure that numbers are accurate—and that crimes don't go unreported.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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