Crime - Hate Crimes

The 1990 Hate Crime Statistics Act (PL 101-275) calls for the U.S. attorney general to "acquire data about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity [and] publish an annual summary of the data acquired under this section." In 1994 the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act (PL 103-322) amended the Hate Crime Statistics Act to include crimes motivated by discrimination against people with physical and/or mental disabilities.

Of the 7,462 hate-bias incidents reported in 2002, 3,642 were racially motivated and 1,102 were ethnically oriented. Of the racially motivated incidents, 2,486 were committed against African-Americans and 719 were committed against whites. Another 1,426 hate-bias incidents in 2002 were motivated by religion. Sexual orientation and physical and mental disabilities were other reasons cited for hate-based incidents. (See Table 8.9.)

TABLE 8.9
Hate-bias incidents, offenses, victims, and known offenders, by bias motivation, 2002

Bias motivation	Incidents	Offenses	Victims1	Known offenders2
Total	7,462	8,832	9,222	7,314
Single-bias incidents	7,459	8,825	9,211	7,311
Race:	3,642	4,393	4,580	4,011
Anti-White	719	888	910	1,064
Anti-Black	2,486	2,967	3,076	2,510
Anti-American Indian/Alaskan Native	62	68	72	52
Anti-Asian/Pacific Islander	217	268	280	242
Anti-multiple races, group	158	202	242	143
Religion:	1,426	1,576	1,659	568
Anti-Jewish	931	1,039	1,084	317
Anti-Catholic	53	58	71	21
Anti-Protestant	55	57	58	34
Anti-Islamic	155	170	174	103
Anti-other religion	198	217	237	73
Anti-multiple religions, group	31	32	32	18
Anti-atheism/agnosticism/etc.	3	3	3	2
Sexual orientation:	1,244	1,464	1,513	1,438
Anti-male homosexual	825	957	984	1,022
Anti-female homosexual	172	207	221	172
Anti-homosexual	222	259	267	225
Anti-heterosexual	10	26	26	6
Anti-bisexual	15	15	15	13
Ethnicity/national origin:	1,102	1,345	1,409	1,247
Anti-Hispanic	480	601	639	656
Anti-other ethnicity/national origin	622	744	770	591
Disability:	45	47	50	47
Anti-physical	20	20	20	21
Anti-mental	25	27	30	26
Multiple-bias incidents3	3	7	11	3
1The term victim may refer to a person, business, institution, or society as a whole.
2The term known offender does not imply that the identity of the suspect is known, but only that an attribute of the suspect is identified, which distinguishes him/her from an unknown offender.
3A multiple-bias occurs only when two or more offense types are committed in a single incident. In a situation where there is more than one offense type, the agency can indicate a different bias for each offense. In the case of a single offense type, only one bias can be indicated.
SOURCE: "Table 1. Incidents, Offenses, Victims, and Known Offenders by Bias Motivation, 2002," in Hate Crime Statistics, 2002, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, DC, 2003 [Online] http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hatecrime2002.pdf [accessed May 13, 2004]

The Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, a private organization that monitors hate groups and paramilitary organizations, reported 751 hate group chapters in 2003, up six percent from the 708 that were active the year before. Hate Web sites, according to the count by the Intelligence Project, increased from 443 in 2002 to 497 in 2003, a 12 percent increase.

In "The Year in Hate," an annual review of organized hate and paramilitary activity around the country, the Intelligence Project reported that among racist organizations active in 2003, the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a resurgence, and the number of skinhead groups doubled from eleven organizations in 2002 to twenty-two groups in 2003. The neo-Nazi category showed a decrease, but Holocaust denial organizations "seemed to be doing well." Another topic of the report included "Patriot" groups, which the Intelligence Project describes as "antigovernment groups like militias that are animated more by conspiracy theories than racial hatred." The number of these groups grew from 143 organizations in 2002 to 171 in 2003, and from 152 Web sites in 2002 to 162 in 2003. Other groups tracked include the neo-Confederate movement, an alliance of southern heritage organizations that claims allegiance to the antebellum South and shares religious conservatism. "The Year in Hate" also reported that racist black separatist groups increased almost 66 percent in 2003, "largely driven by the addition of more than thirty additional chapters of the New Black Panther Party."