Hate Crime Recorded by Law Enforcement Agencies: Data Considerations and Challenges

• In Event: A Discussion of Hate Crime Data and Implications for Research, Practice, and Policy

Abstract

The Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA), passed by Congress in 1990, required the Attorney General to collect data “about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.” Over the intervening years, the HCSA has been revised several times to encompass other types of bias motivations, to include hate crimes against persons with disabilities, and gender and gender identify, as well as to expand the bias types in the religion category. Responsibility for collecting information on bias-motivated incidents reported to law enforcement lies with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, which produces an annual publication on hate crime data submitted by more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. This presentation will provide an overview on hate crime data reported by law enforcement, including rules for classifying incidents suspected to be motivated by bias, findings from a recent report using FBI data collected under the HCSA, Hate Crime Recorded by Law Enforcement, 2010-2019, review how hate crimes are identified and recorded at the local level, and discuss the challenges with collecting these data and ways to improve the identification of bias-motivated crime incidents.

Author

• Erica L Smith, Bureau of Justice Statistics