Hate crime data incomplete due partly to varying police reporting practices Commentary
Hate crime data incomplete due partly to varying police reporting practices
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Phyllis Gerstenfeld [Professor and Chair, Department of Criminal Justice,
California State University, Stanislaus]: "This week, the FBI reported a 2% increase in hate crimes in 2008, as compared to the previous year. While hate crimes are an important problem in the United States (and abroad), this reported increase itself should be grounds for neither particular concern nor comfort. The reason for this is that the FBI data give us an incomplete picture at best.

While federal law requires the FBI to collect hate crime data from local law enforcement agencies, the agencies themselves are not generally required to keep track of hate crimes. Most do – and more did during 2008 than 2007, which may help account for the increase in reported incidents – but some still do not. Even among the agencies that do report hate crimes, however, the accuracy and completeness of the reporting differs a great deal. In a study I conducted several years ago, for example, I found that San Francisco reported nearly ten times as many hate crimes per year as its similarly-sized neighbor to the south, San Jose. A large part of this difference was likely due to the cities' differing approaches to recording and handling hate crimes. At the time, for instance, San Francisco had a bias crime unit and San Jose did not. Other researchers have found very much the same thing in other places; whether a particular incident gets reported as a hate crime may depend a great deal on the policies of a particular agency, as well as the training and perceptions of the officers involved. While many crimes may have variance in reporting, that situation is especially true for hate crimes, where the circumstances are often ambiguous and the offenders' motives must be determined.

Another reason to be cautious when interpreting the FBI data is the fact that only a small percentage of hate crimes ever get reported to the police in the first place. Research suggests that for a variety of reasons victims are particularly unlikely to report hate crimes. Among these reasons are some communities' poor relationships with law enforcement; victims' fears of being outed, facing retaliation, or, in the case of undocumented immigrants, facing legal sanctions themselves; and victims' lack of knowledge about hate crime laws. We can be quite sure that the 7,780 incidents reported by the FBI in 2008 represent only a small portion of the total.

Finally, hate crime rates can be temporarily affected by current events. Perhaps the most obvious example of this was the spike in crimes against Muslims, Arabs, and those of Middle-Eastern ancestry that occurred in the weeks following 9/11. More recently, some areas have reported increases in crimes against immigrants, perhaps as a by-product of the nation's larger debate against immigration as well as the failing economy. Legal battles in California and other states concerning gay marriage may also have sparked some violence.

The FBI hate crime data certainly have value, especially in the absence of more accurate methods of tracking hate crimes in the United States. However, small changes like those just reported should not be the primary focus of our inquiries into hate violence. The data are simply too fallible."

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