Staff WriterReports of the hate-based crimes in the United States
Comparisons were made in this year’s data with the last year’s. Bias crimes have an increase as the released data is being questioned by advocacy groups and other critics. They believe that the showed data is incomplete. The FBI has been recording the data of those crimes since the 1990s. The Justice Department has for years been specifically prioritizing hate crime prosecutions.
In a total of 51 hate crime murders in 2019. The shooting at a Walmart in the border city of El Paso, Texas left many people injured. The person who is responsible for this now faces state and federal charges. This shooting was in an attempt of threatening Hispanics to leave the U.S. Last year 7,314 hate crimes were reported up from 7,120 the year before those statistics nearly approach the 7,783 of 2008.
The FBI’s annual defines those crimes as by bias based on a person’s race, religion, or sexual orientation. Reports in 2019 are a result of better recording and reporting. Hate crimes are rising according to officials and advocacy groups. Data already shows an increase of 7% in religious hate crimes. Last year were 953 reports of crimes mostly targeting Jews, up from 835 the year before. Data also shows that hate crimes against African Americans dropped to 1,930, from 1,943.Different reports for Anti-Hispanic hate crimes which were 527 in 2019, from 485 in 2018.
Hate crimes against the LGBT community are almost the same. There were only 20 more hate crimes against gay men. The law enforcement agencies take the responsibility for reporting those statistics. But the number of agencies participating in the program actually dropped from the year before. 2,172 agencies out of 15,000 across the country reported hate crime data to the FB. With this lack of participation will be hard to accurately and fully measure the FBI’s data collection process.
