FBI: Race And Sexual Orientation Top Hate Crimes List Just Released

The FBI today released its latest hate crimes report, and race and sexual orientation are the two biggest issues. Here’s what you need to know.

The photo above shows future New York City mayor Bill de Blasio in May of 2013, towering above the crowd, marching in a protest against the anti-gay hate crime murder of Mark Carson just days earlier. 

Today the FBI released the national 2013 hate crimes report, finding that there were 7,242 victims of bias incidents. The number of hate crimes instances dropped somewhat, from 6573 in 2012 to 5928 last year.

Almost half, or 48.5 percent, were bias incidents were racially motivated. 

Of those, the vast majority, 66.4 percent “were motivated by anti-black or African-American bias, and 21.4 percent stemmed from anti-white bias,” the FBI reports.

Bias incidents motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity accounted for 21.3 percent of all bias crimes reported, or a little more than one in five.

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.

Contrary to claims made by the right, this FBI report shows that Christians are not being persecuted or attacked at an above-average rate. In fact, hate crimes motivated by the victim’s religion account for 17.4 percent of the total.

The FBI says that this is the first year, thanks to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act of 2009, that “biases against gender (male or female) and gender identity (transgender and gender nonconformity) have been added to the list of bias categories.”

And while that’s important, the Anti-Violence Project tells The New Civil Rights Movement exclusively that these numbers represent “just the tip of the iceberg.”

“While it is encouraging that the FBI is including data on hate crimes against transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) victims and survivors in its annual reports, we know that these statistics are just the tip of the iceberg,” Osman Ahmed, AVP’s National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs Research and Education Coordinator tells NCRM.

“LGBTQ communities, specifically TGNC communities, have long been criminalized by law enforcement in the United States and, as the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Program’s Annual Hate violence report shows, have very low rates of reporting to the police after experiencing hate violence. The real problem to be addressed is law enforcement culture and problematic policing of marginalized communities in the United States and eliminating the criminalization of TGNC communities by law enforcement.”

So many lost to or impacted by hate, so much more work to do.

 

Image by Michael Fleshman via Flickr