Hate Crime Fact Sheet

Hate Crime Fact Sheet

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program today released the final hate crime data for 2001 in its annual publication, Hate Crime Statistics. During 2001, state and local law enforcement agencies reported to the FBI 9,730 incidents which involved 11,451 separate offenses.

Of the 9,730 incidents reported, 9,721 were single-bias incidents (incidents involving only one bias motivation). A breakdown of the 9,721 single-bias incidents shows that 44.9 percent were motivated by racial bias, 21.6 percent were driven by prejudice against an ethnicity or national origin, 18.8 percent resulted from a bias against a particular religion, 14.3 percent involved a bias against sexual-orientation, and 0.4 percent were motivated by a disability bias.

Of the 11,451 hate crime offenses reported in 2001, 67.8 percent were crimes against persons, and 31.5 percent of the offenses were crimes against property. Intimidation continued to be the most frequently reported hate crime offense committed against individuals, accounting for 55.9 percent of all crimes against persons. At 83.7 percent, the offense of destruction/damage/vandalism of property was the most frequently reported crime against property. Less than 1 percent (0.6 percent) of hate crimes were crimes against society.

During 2001, there were 12,020 total victims of hate crime. Of that total, 11,998 were victims of single-bias incidents. Of the 11,998 victims of single-bias incidents, 46.2 percent were victims of racial prejudice, 22.0 percent were victims of ethnicity or national origin bias, 17.7 percent were targets of religious intolerance, 13.9 percent were attacked because of sexual orientation, and 0.3 percent were victims of a disability bias. Of the 12,020 total victims of hate crime, 22 were victims of multiple-biases.

Ten of the hate crime victims were murdered in 2001. Five of these homicides were attributed to a bias against an ethnicity or national origin, 4 involved racial bias, and 1 was driven by bias against a sexual orientation.

Law enforcement agencies reported 9,239 known offenders in connection with the 9,730 incidents reported in 2001. (A known offender does not imply that the identity of the suspect is known, but only that the suspect’s race is known.) The majority of known hate crime offenders (65.5 percent) were white, 20.4 percent were black, 8.2 percent were of unknown race, and the remainder were of other races or were members of a group that consisted of offenders of varying races.

The majority of hate crime incidents (30.9 percent) occurred in or on residential properties. Highways, roads, alleys, or streets were the settings for 18.3 percent of the reported incidents, and 10.1 percent took place at schools and colleges. The remaining incidents were distributed among various locations.

In 2001, 11,987 law enforcement agencies contributed hate crime data to the UCR Program, and approximately 17.6 percent of those agencies submitted reports to the FBI that at least one hate crime occurred in their jurisdictions. These figures indicate a slight increase over the number of agencies submitting data in 2000.

Hate Crime Statistics, 2001, can be found on the FBI’s Internet site at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2001/hatecrime01.pdf.