The FBI recorded a drop in hate crimes in 2021, but this year's tally may not give a true account of hate crimes in the United States as thousands of law enforcement agencies were absent from the accounting.
The Pride flag is reflected in the glasses of a white nationalist who came to protest at the LGBTQ+ community's"Pride in the Park" event in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, on June 11, 2022.The Pride flag is reflected in the glasses of a white nationalist who came to protest at the LGBTQ+ community's"Pride in the Park" event in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, on June 11, 2022.
The participation drop-off is due to a transition from a legacy crime reporting system that has existed in various forms since the 1920s to a more sophisticated reporting system that captures specific details of a crime. It allows the FBI and researchers to extract deeper analysis from crime statistics. For example, FBI data in 2021 showed that approximately 80% of homicides nationwide were committed with a firearm.
In a news release, the Justice Department said"data cannot reliably be compared across years" as"several of the nation's largest law enforcement agencies, as well as some states, did not make the transition." As more law enforcement agencies transition to the new system, the department said, it would be able to"provide a richer and more complete picture of hate crimes nationwide.
"There's 200,000 to 300,000 hate crime incidents in a given year and the FBI data records less than 10,000 of them," says Eaven Holder, who authored a peer-reviewed study examining 18 years between the two data sets."Estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey suggests that 40 to 50% of all hate crimes go unreported to police."
"Sometimes the FBI and the welfare agencies will disagree about why, the amount of bias, or disagree whether it was a hate crime," Kaplan says.