Report: Hate Crimes 'Increase' Likely Due to Increase In Jurisdictions Reporting Incidents to FBI

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
Feb. 25, 2019

Reason Magazine's Elizabeth Nolan Brown investigated the supposed "rise in hate crimes" in America and found the data shows it appears to be tied to a large increase in jurisdictions reporting alleged hate crime incidents to the FBI.

Democrats like Kamala Harris have tried to dodge responsibility for pushing the Jussie Smollett alleged hate hoax by claiming it masks the bigger picture that "hate crimes are on the rise in America."

The reality is hate crimes are actually way down since 2006.

From Reason:

We have higher numbers of incidents, but we also have more and more police agencies participating in the voluntary reporting system.

In 2017, there were around 1,050 more bias-based incident reports than the previous year--a 17 percent rise. There were also around 1,000 additional agencies reporting. [...]

In 2016, there were 271 more incidents deemed hate crimes than in 2015, with 257 more law enforcement agencies reporting. As I pointed out when those data came out, "the number of hate crime classifications was higher in 2016 than in any of the four preceding years" but "lower than in 2011 and significantly down from 2006-08." There were also fewer victims in 2016: 7,615, down from 9,652 in 2006.

We saw no significant rise in hate crimes from 2004 and 2015, either. A Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that "the rate of violent hate crime victimization" in 2015 "was not significantly different from the rate in 2004" and that this "held true for violent hate crimes both reported and unreported to police."

Even these numbers are somewhat ambiguous. They represent police investigations opened, not necessarily incidents where a suspect was ever confirmed. So we could be dealing with false positives.

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