December 8, 2014

Latest Hate Crime Statistics Report Released

Publication Includes New Data Collected Under Shepard/Byrd Act

Hate Crime report chart

Today, the FBI released its annual Hate Crime Statistics report, which revealed that 5,928 hate crime incidents involving 6,933 offenses were reported by our law enforcement partners to the Bureau’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program in 2013. These hate crime incidents impacted a total of 7,242 victims—which are defined as individuals, businesses, institutions, or society as a whole.

The number of reported hate crimes last year is down slightly when compared to 2012 UCR figures—5,928 in 2013 versus the 2012 figure of 6,573 (a combination of the 5,796 incidents in Hate Crime Statistics, 2012 and the 777 additional incidents published in Hate Crime Addendum, 2012).

Hate Crime Statistics, 2013—the first UCR publication to contain data collected under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act of 2009—has a few changes from previous reports. First, biases against gender (male or female) and gender identity (transgender and gender nonconformity) have been added to the list of bias categories. And in response to the Shepard/Byrd Act, we modified our data collection so that reporting agencies can indicate whether crimes were committed by, or directed against, juveniles.

Changes to this latest report include a revision of sexual orientation bias types, a revision of race and ethnicity categories, and the collection of rape data under the new UCR rape definition. For additional information on these changes, read About Hate Crime Statistics.

Among the report’s findings for 2013:

  • Of the 5,928 incidents reported, six were multiple-bias hate crime incidents involving 12 victims.
  • Of the 5,922 single bias incidents reported, the top three bias categories were race (48.5 percent), sexual orientation (20.8 percent), and religion (17.4 percent).
  • Of the reported 3,407 single-bias hate crime offenses that were racially motivated, 66.4 were motivated by anti-black or African-American bias, and 21.4 percent stemmed from anti-white bias.
    60.6 percent of the reported 1,402 hate crime offenses based on sexual orientation were classified as anti-gay (male) bias.
  • Law enforcement agencies identified 5,814 known offenders in the 5,928 bias-motivated incidents. Of these offenders, 52.4 percent were white and 24.3 percent were black or African-American.
  • Of the 6,933 hate crime offenses reported in 2013, 63.9 percent were crimes against persons (e.g., intimidation, assaults, rapes, murders), while 35 percent were property crimes (mostly acts of destruction/damage/vandalism). The rest were considered crimes against society (like drug offenses or prostitution).

Upcoming changes to Hate Crime Statistics: The FBI approved a recommendation by the Criminal Justice Information Services Division’s Advisory Policy Board to expand the bias types in the religious category to include all the religions identified by the Pew Research Center and the U.S. Census Bureau. Also, the hate crime data collection procedures will be modified to include an anti-Arab bias motivation. The collecting of both types of data will begin on January 1, 2015.

The UCR Program continues its efforts to assist our law enforcement partners in collecting and submitting hate crime data and with establishing or updating hate crime training programs for their personnel. Most recently, we held a training session for UCR contributors that focused on upcoming changes to the hate crime report, and we’re in the process of revising our Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines and Training Manual with new definitions and scenarios that reflect those changes.


Recent Investigative Successes Against Hate Crime Perpetrators

The investigation of hate crimes remains a top priority of the FBI’s civil rights program. We investigate hate crimes that fall under federal jurisdiction, can assist state and local authorities during their own investigations, and in some cases—with the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division—monitor developing situations to determine if federal action is appropriate. Here are several examples of cases we’ve recently investigated:

  • In November 2014, a Texas man was sentenced to 15 years in prison for luring a young gay man to his home and brutally assaulting him because of his sexual orientation. Details
  • In September 2014, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan pleaded guilty for his role in a cross burning in front of an interracial family’s home in Tennessee. Details
  • Also in September 2014, a Utah man pleaded guilty to interfering with the housing rights of three members of an interracial family by threatening to kill them if they did not make their African-American family member leave their home. Details
  • In July 2014, four individuals were indicted for their alleged roles in a racially motivated crime spree targeting African-Americans in Jackson, Mississippi. Details
  • In April 2014, a man was indicted on federal hate crime charges for making anti-Semitic threats against a Jewish businesswoman who owned an Albuquerque restaurant. Details