Hate crime data is still a mess, but anti-Jewish hate crimes are expected to increase in 2023

The FBI’s hate crime data is a mess. I’ve talked about it several justand a paragraph from last year’s article on hate crimes gets to the heart of the problem:

Much of the problem with hate crime data is that it leaves it up to authorities to decide what gets reported. What constitutes murder or motor vehicle theft is clearly defined by the FBI and relates almost exclusively to the crime. However, in hate crimes, a law enforcement agency must determine the perpetrator’s motive. The FBI’s Hate Crimes Manual states: “Due to the difficulty of determining the perpetrator’s subjective motivation, bias should be reported only when the investigation reveals sufficient objective facts to lead a reasonable and prudent person to conclude that that the perpetrator’s actions were motivated, in whole or in part, by bias.”

Are hate crimes increasing because more authorities are reporting, reporting authorities are more acknowledging incidents, people are more willing to report incidents, or because hate crimes are actually increasing? Normally we can’t say for sure!

The FBI’s access to hate crime data is actually really good. You can download a CSV file with information about every hate crime ever reported Crime Data Explorer and play around with it.

This shows that the number of hate crimes reported nationwide increased slightly in 2023…

While the number of agencies reporting at least one hate crime and the population covered by agencies reporting at least one hate crime decreased slightly.

The question always remains whether reported hate crimes have actually increased in a given year or whether this is due to a change in reporting patterns – either by the agency or by the reporting population.

There are definitely a lot of strange incidents that stand out year after year. The town of Flowood, MS (population approximately 10,000) reported two hate crimes in 2023. Both were shoplifting cases with an anti-white bias committed by a long-time perpetrator.

Imagine that.

The city of Natchitoches, LA (population approximately 17,000) reported a hate crime in 2023, the first in the city since 2015. It was a Buddhist wire fraud hate crime.

Again, imagine that.

You also need to remember that the NIBRS transition has increased the number of certain types of crimes that are only covered through NIBRS. Shoplifting hate crime incidents, like the one in Flowood, have jumped from 23 in 2013 to 84 in 2023, but that likely just reflects more NIBRS-compliant agencies reporting hate crimes (non-NIBRS agencies do not collect specific data on shoplifting incidents ). .

However, there are some cases where you will see a big change in hate crimes and can probably conclude that the change is due to an increase in the number of crimes being committed and not just a change in reporting. This becomes clear when one considers the anti-Muslim crimes (in this case grouped with the terms “anti-Islamic” and “anti-Arab”) in September 2001, the anti-Black crimes in the summer of 2020, and the anti-Jewish crimes October 2023 recorded.

Hate crime data will only be collected after December 2023, so the current trend until 2024 is unknown. Looking at what happened during other surges in 2001 and 2020, I would assume that the rise in reported anti-Jewish hate crimes was relatively short-lived, and on the other side of the surge, crimes were reported at higher rates than before. But we won’t know that for another year.

Not surprisingly, most of the increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes has been reported in New York City, home to a disproportionate share of the U.S. Jewish population. Whether increased reporting after the surge would lead to more crimes or increased reporting is difficult to say. And that’s the crux of the challenge with hate crime data. It is not advisable to read too much into the sales figures because there is so much uncertainty inherent in the data.

Sometimes there is something to be said about hate crime trends, but for the most part, the newly released hate crime data is all about the quality of the data itself.

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