Abstract:
Hate crimes reported to police in America’s ten largest cities rose 12.5 percent in 2017. The increase was the fourth consecutive annual rise in a row and the highest total in over a decade according to an analysis by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. In contrast to the increase in hate crime in the ten largest cities last year, crime in general dropped slightly across the nation in the first half of 2017, with preliminary FBI figures showing a 0.8 percent decrease in violent crime and a 2.9 percent decrease in property crime. The 2017 ten city total of 1,038 hate crimes also marked the first time in more than a decade that the combined number of official reports have exceeded one thousand. In a larger sample of over three dozen large local agencies, the study found a near identical increase of 12 percent last year ....Compounding victim reluctance to report are jurisdictions that simply appear not to participate at all in identifying hate crime. Other federal data indicates massive underreporting of hate crime in FBI data as well, which relies on voluntary compliance by the states. Residential home crime surveys conducted by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released this past June estimate the overall number of hate crimes is far higher than what FBI figures indicate; averaging 250,000 annually and accounting for 3.7% of all violent crime. In 2015 BJS estimated 208,000 hate crimes in the United States, with a high percentage of victims not reporting. Conversely, our Center has found a very small number of approximately two dozen confirmed or suspected instances of false reporting “hoaxes” in the last couple of years amidst thousands of police of hate crimes reported to police. [CVRL Note: includes official police data from 38 jurisdictions, with additional focus on New York City and Los Angeles, additional reporting from Southern Poverty Law Center, and discussion of Russian social media campaigns and ads related to promoting division during 2016; chart on page 10 of pdf lists bias crime reported between 1992-2016, with annotations about coinciding major events with spikes in the number of hate crimes.] (Author Text)