FBI – The FBI on Monday released its annual Hate Crime Statistics report, which revealed that 5,928 hate crime incidents involving 6,933 offenses were reported by our law enforcement partners to the Bureau’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program in 2013.
These hate crime incidents impacted a total of 7,242 victims—which are defined as individuals, businesses, institutions, or society as a whole.
The number of reported hate crimes last year is down slightly when compared to 2012 UCR figures—5,928 in 2013 versus the 2012 figure of 6,573 (a combination of the 5,796 incidents in Hate Crime Statistics, 2012 and the 777 additional incidents published in Hate Crime Addendum, 2012).
Hate Crime Statistics, 2013—the first crime report publication to contain data collected under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act of 2009—has a few changes from previous reports, the FBI report states.
First, biases against gender (male or female) and gender identity (transgender and gender nonconformity) have been added to the list of bias categories. And in response to the Shepard/Byrd Act, we modified our data collection so that reporting agencies can indicate whether crimes were committed by, or directed against, juveniles.
Among the report’s findings for 2013:
- Of the 5,928 incidents reported, six were multiple-bias hate crime incidents involving 12 victims.
- Of the 5,922 single bias incidents reported, the top three bias categories were race (48.5 percent), sexual orientation (20.8 percent), and religion (17.4 percent).
- Of the reported 3,407 single-bias hate crime offenses that were racially motivated, 66.4 were motivated by anti-black or African-American bias, and 21.4 percent stemmed from anti-white bias.
- 60.6 percent of the reported 1,402 hate crime offenses based on sexual orientation were classified as anti-gay (male) bias.
- Law enforcement agencies identified 5,814 known offenders in the 5,928 bias-motivated incidents. Of these offenders, 52.4 percent were white and 24.3 percent were black or African-American.
- Of the 6,933 hate crime offenses reported in 2013, 63.9 percent were crimes against persons (i.e., intimidation, assaults, rapes, murders), while 35 percent were property crimes (mostly acts of destruction/damage/vandalism). The rest were considered crimes against society (like drug offenses or prostitution).