Last month in Bloomington, Ind., an Asian-American student was reportedly stabbed in the head while riding a bus by an individual who claimed she targeted the student because she was Chinese.
And near the end of 2022, we saw atrocious attacks such as the fatal shooting at an LGBTQ+ club in Colorado Springs and the vicious assault of a Jewish victim in Central Park by a man who reportedly yelled “Kanye 2024.”
Hate crimes — crimes in which a person is targeted because of a protected, immutable identity characteristic — cause unique and widespread harm. They send a message of fear, intimidation and exclusion not only to the individual victim but also to the group of people who share that person’s identity characteristics.
In order to effectively counter hate crimes, we must have data that demonstrates the scope and magnitude of the problem. Under the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990, the attorney general is required to collect data about hate crimes across the country and publish an annual report.
But attacks like the ones mentioned above are currently at risk of not being counted in the federally collected data at all. The reason? Many police departments are failing to report hate crime data to the FBI.
When the FBI released its latest report on hate crimes data for 2021 in December, there were astounding gaps in the data — gaps that are wider and more widespread than we have seen in decades. Overall, there was a sharp 22 percent decrease in the number of reporting agencies, the lowest number of agencies in 20 years. The Jewish Federations of North America noted that, on top of the sharp decline in the number of agencies that participated in reporting, some of the most populated cities in the country, including New York City and Los Angeles, did not participate, nor did “nearly the entire state of Florida or most of California.”
This alarming lack of data for 2021 has rendered it…
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