More than 10,000 people reported to law enforcement last year that they were the victim of a hate crime because of their race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, religion or disability
The report, released on Monday, found more than 7,700 criminal hate crime incidents were reported to the FBI in 2020, an increase of about 450 incidents over 2019. The increase comes even as fewer agencies reported hate crime incidents in their jurisdictions to the FBI than in previous years.Last year had the highest tally of reported hate crime incidents since 2008, when 7,783 incidents were reported to the FBI.
"Scope of the problem hard to captureHate crime and bias incident data released by police departments and federal agencies is just a fraction of actual incidents, and deficiencies in hate-crime reporting have led organizers and activists to take it upon themselves to collect data on their own. Even then, the definitions of hate crime may differ, leaving policymakers with competing datasets that don't capture the scope of the problem.