Empirical Realities of Hate Crime in America

Hate Crimes in the United States

The rate of hate crimes in the United States has continued to increase in the recent past despite the decline in the number of hate crime groups throughout the country. There are numerous sources of data that provide significant insights regarding hate crime in America including official and official data. The federal government usually collects and publishes official information regarding hate crimes while other organizations provide unofficial data on these crimes depending on various factors. Generally, hate crime in the U.S. is classified into religious hate crimes, sexual orientation hate crimes, racial/ethnic hate crimes, gender identity hate crimes, and disability hate crimes.

According to Ingraham (2015), the rate of hate crimes in the United States have remained stable in the past decade with the total number of reported hate crimes ranging between 200,000 and 300,000 cases during this period. However, the number of active hate crime groups has declined and continues to decrease in the past decade. Hate crime groups are defined as groups with beliefs or activities that slander or attack certain class of people because of their unique characteristics. Most hate groups in the United States are concentrated in Northern Plains, particularly the Deep South, which implies that they are not even distributed geographically. The major factor that contributes to these crimes is hardships, especially poverty and unemployment. In addition, hate crimes are mostly fueled by breakdown in formal sanctioning and law enforcement as well as support for civil disobedience.

Based on statistics by the Federal Bureau of Investigations, there were 5,479 hate crime cases reported by law enforcement agencies, which affected 6,727 victims (The Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2015). However, the number of reported hate crime incidents slightly declined as compared to the previous year. Racial hate crimes accounted for 47% of these offenses followed by sexual orientation and religious hate crimes at 18.6% each, ethnicity hate crimes at 11.9%, gender identity hate crimes at 1.8%, disability hate crimes at 1.5%, and gender hate crimes at 0.6%. Even though more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies made contributions to Hate Crime Statistics Report in Uniform Crime Reporting, only 1,666 agencies reported these incidents in their jurisdictions while others had zero hate offenses (The Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2015).

Despite accounting for a significant portion of reported hate crimes, racial hate offenses declined by 1.5% as compared to the previous year though has remained relatively steady in recent years. Based on data regarding the number of hate crimes targeting racial groups, blacks or African-Americans account for a huge portion of racial hate crimes i.e. 50 people in every 1 million black persons. Similarly the overall rates of sexual orientation hate offenses (i.e. crimes targeting the LGBTQ community) have remained relatively steady since 2012 with between 2,000 and 3,000 reported incidents. Notably, there is a high level of violence targeting these individuals as well as HIV-affected individuals. Religious hate crimes have increased in recent years, especially those targeting Muslims or people of the Islamic faith. There are high rates of unreported racial, sexual orientation, and religious hate crimes unlike other categories, which imply that the actual rate of these unreported crimes, remain largely unknown.