Data Set: https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#
Introduction
Definition
A hate crime is classified as such when even a portion of the motivation for the crime is motivated by the perpetrator’s hate for a particular classification of people. The biases included in the FBI hate crime data target individuals based on one’s race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, gender and gender, gender identity. Hate Crime — FBI
Data Collection
Just a note on data collection. The 2022 data was collected from 14,660 law enforcement agencies of 18,888 that submitted data. There could be differences in the handling of hate data between reporting agencies and those that don’t participate in the collection of data. It could be that agencies with even more hate want to hide this, and thus don’t report the cases, or may be unwilling to aggravate the criminal charges by labeling it a hate crime.
Data Collection and Generalizability
For the purposes of my analysis, I am analyzing trends within the law enforcement agencies that reported hate crimes. Depending on any significant differences in the willingness to classify a crime as hate motivated, or in the actual numbers of hate motivated crimes in the non-reporting law enforcement agencies could affect the generalizability of this analysis to those areas covered by the non-reporting law enforcement agencies.
Bias Focus
I focused on the most prevalent biases, anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, anti-Latino, and anti-Asian. There were others, but they were less frequent and the stories I am telling affect these groups the most. For this reason, I left the other biases out from my analysis.
US Hate Crime (1991 – 2022)
Racial Hate
According to U.S. Population 1950-2024 | MacroTrends, the US population in 2024 is 341,814,420. In 1991, the US population was 251,560,189. While the population has been increasing, the number of hate crimes with an anti-black bias was on a general downward trend between 1996 through approximately 2014, with a few increases, such as 2008, when the economic recession and the market crash. Then starting in 2015, hate frequencies started increasing again. This trend continued with a huge spike from 2019 into 2020, when Covid arrived. According to census.gov, 2020 U.S. Population More Racially, Ethnically Diverse Than in 2010 (census.gov), in 2020 the white alone, non-Hispanic population was 57.8% of the population. The Hispanic/ Latino population was the 2nd largest group at 18.7% and the black, African American alone, non-Hispanic population was 12.1%. According to the census article above, the biggest changes in racial demographics between 2010 and 2020 were in the multi-racial categories. The multi-racial population went from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020.
Looking at the hate crime data, many of the hate crimes had multiple bias categories selected. I would interpret this as the individual held hate toward many groups. The frequency of anti-black bias in this data set was consistently higher than other biases, and with greater spikes, although this would be expected since bias categories with the most crimes, would have larger appearing spikes from a percentage standpoint. A 25% change from a larger number will appear to be a bigger spike. Of note is that while Latin Americans are a larger percentage of the population, fewer hate crimes referenced an anti-Hispanic or anti-Latino bias than reference an anti-black or anti-African American bias. My point here is that the largest hate is about skin color, even more so than a particular cultural group (outside of African Americans). The anti-black/ African American is listed as Anti-Black or African American. I interpret this to mean some of the hate crimes coded with this bias may include non-African Americans, but who have darker skin coloring and they are targeted because of their skin color. Some of the multi-racial individuals, not easily identifiable as a coming from a particular country or continent of origin, may fall within this category. Thus, it is probably wise for me to avoid comparing one hate bias against another in terms of which group is most impacted. However, I will note that I was able to see peaks and patterns at particular times, through certain political climates or economic events where hate crimes against particular groups spiked. I was able to clearly see different peak months and years for each bias. I could easily tie these differences to political and economic events at the time.
In the plots below you will see that during economic recessions or a global pandemic, we can see hate crime increases the persist for a longer period of time. In other cases, we can see spikes related racial injustices or a particular event that triggers outrage. For example, below you will plots showing the spikes in anti-black and anti-white biased hate crime after the police were found not guilty of the Rodney King beating. Another plot will show the anti-black biased hate crime after the George Floyd killing. We also see the spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attack. Note that in each of these cases, there was a brief peak and then a sharp drop.
Economic downturns resulted in longer term increases, less of a pronounced peak, in hate related crimes. Also, hate crimes with an anti-Latino bias increased from 2015 to 2016 and kept increasing throughout the Trump presidency and beyond. We also saw a spike in hate against Asian Americans throughout Covid, again following anti-China rhetoric from Trump.
Religious Hate
Boxplot of US Hate Crime (1991 – 2022)
Here’s a plot to show the data spread or variability. Above we can see that the anti-black hate shows much greater variability between the maximum and minimum, but without any outliers. With the anti-Jewish hate and anti-Hispanic/ Latino hate we see a smaller spread between the maximum and minimum, but also without outliers. The plot is showing that the frequency data of hate crimes against Asian Americans, Muslim Americans, Arab Americans and white Americans all contained outlier data. This is most likely from single major events which resulted in a very large spike, outside of their normal frequency. For example, the anti-China rhetoric during covid caused a large spike in hate crime with an anti-Asian bias. The anti-white outlier data would be after the police were found not guilty of beating Rodney King. We see that most of the data is at or below the median. This would be negatively skewed, meaning that the upper quartile is smaller than the lower quartile.
Hate and the Economy
1991 Economic Crisis
Looking at the plot above, we can see an increase in anti-white and anti-black hate bias from February 1991 to March, which continued, generally trending through September. I was initially expecting to see a greater spike in hate crimes, both anti-black and anti-white, just after the beating of Rodney King by the police, which was caught on video. However, many of the event triggered hate crimes last for a month or so. Here we see a prolonged increase in hate throughout the year. It is worth noting that there was also an economic recession going on, which is likely the main culprit here. There was likely something else going on here in addition to the economic recession as the recession began in 1990 through 1991, but the recovery was “jobless” and unemployment increased until June 1992. However, the hate crimes continued to climb through 1996, with a decrease in 1994, but then spiked even higher before decreasing in 1997.
2007-2008 Economic Crisis
2007 was the start of the economic crisis. Many will think of the 2008 market crash, but the crisis started in 2007. Hate crime frequency appears to increase through 2007, with a larger peak in Oct 2007 against black people and Jewish people. The anti-black hate starts to drop back down after the market crash in 2008 (September 29th). You will notice that there was a similar drop off in the November, December time frame in each of the years displayed. However, looking back up at the 1991 – 2022 plot, we can see that there was a decrease in hate crime in 2009 following the 2008 spike.
Precipitating Events?
April 29, 1992 – Police found not guilty of beating Rodney King
You will see a clear increase in hate immediately following the not guilty verdict in the case against the police who beat Rodney King. The verdict was handed down on April 29, 1992. We see that May showed a marked increase in anti-white bias hate. This was unprecedented to see the anti-white bias surpass the anti-black bias, which also spiked. The spike in anti-white and anti-black hate crime came after the trial and justice was denied.
May 25, 2020 – George Floyd killed by police officer Derek Chauvin
After George Floyd’s death, there were many protests. While some referred to the protests as riots, the hate crime data suggests a different story. Instead of African American outrage, we see rage against African Americans in June 2020. There was a slightly less pronounced peak in anti-white hate. From April until June anti-black hate increased from 137 to 723, or an increase of 586, a 420% increase. Anti-white crime increased from 39 to 187 in the same time period. this is an increase of 148, or a 379% increase. This would tend to suggest a more peaceful response from black community relative to the white community in 2020, in contrast to post Rodney King, where the anti-white hate crimes surpassed the anti-black hate crimes, not just in a percentage increase, but in actual numbers.
Comparing 1992 to 2020: min, max, mean
The plot below shows the minimum, maximum and mean monthly hate crimes numbers. We can see that the largest number of hate crimes in one month during 2020 was 723, much larger than peak of approximately 250 in 1992.
Looking at the minimum, maximum and mean monthly values for each year, we can see above that the anti-black bias was much stronger in 2020. We see below the opposite, that the strongest anti-white bias was after the Rodney King verdict, although there is a not small peak in 2020.
September 11, 2001 – Terror Attacks
See data below for anti-Islamic/Muslim hate in the month September after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It does stand out that the anti-Muslim hate bias exceeded the anti-black hate bias in September 2011. This is quite remarkable in that Muslims are a much smaller portion of the population and the crimes increased to approximately 300 times as many hate crimes. While many thought that anti-Islamic/Muslim hate stayed high for years after the attacks. However, the numbers stayed high for a couple of months, but then dropped, although not to the pre-9/11 levels.
Covid
Looking below, you can see the increase in anti-Asian hate in March 2021, which remains high through June. People’s anger at masks, remote education was at a boiling point and Trump had directed people’s hate toward Asian people with his anti-China rhetoric.
Possible Interpretations
Non-Reporting Law Enforcement Agencies
Also worth noting, some of the non-reporting law enforcement agencies could fall in the lower reporting districts. We don’t know if there are actual differences in the numbers of hate crimes, or if it is a difference of labeling. What we can say is that according to the data New Jersey is reporting the most hate motivated crimes in the US.
Public Sentiment and Hate
As I considered the rate of hate crimes per 100k across by state plot in conjunction with the 2020 hate crime spike in anti-black hate motivated crimes after the murder of George Floyd, a theory came to mind. I wonder if one is more likely to perpetrate a hate-based crime when they feel their anger and resentments are not supported by the general public or those within their community. After the police were found not guilty of the Rodney King beating, there was more anti-white hate than anti-black hate. This was reversed after George Floyd’s death, when there was more anti-black hate.
Then I was thinking about the success of the Black Lives Matter movement and the outrage by even many white people who were shocked and saddened by the murder of George Floyd. With the public support for the black community in this case and increased questioning of the police, this may have triggered those on the who did not support Black Lives Matter, who now felt isolated within their own communities. I posit or theorize that when perpetrators felt judged by people within their own perceived community, they were more likely to lash out in rage. This might explain the different response after George Floyd’s death, as compared to the response after the Rodney King verdict.
It could also be that as public support for Black Lives Matter increases, there is an increased willingness to aggravate the charges against white people by labeling the crime as hate motivated.