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Image posted, EPA
The murder of 22 people in a shooting in Texas in 2019 is the most egregious hate crime in the period covered by this report.
An FBI report said that hate crimes in the United States over the past year have recorded their highest rate in more than ten years.
The report stated that hate murders reached a record high in 2019, as the number of hate murders last year reached 51, which is more than twice the number of crimes associated with the same motive in 2018.
Twenty-two people were killed in a shootout against Mexicans at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, in August 2019.
The rate of hate crimes in the United States has continued to rise since 2014, amid warnings from activists about the spread of bigoted and racist rhetoric.
“The recent increase in the hate crime rate indicates a brutal new scene,” said Brian Levine, director of the Center for Studies on Hate and Extremism at California State University.
The annual report on hate crime statistics released by the FBI said that there were 7,314 hate crimes recorded last year compared to 7,120 recorded the previous year, reaching the highest rate since 2008, when 7,783 such crimes were recorded.
The report defines a hate crime as a crime “motivated by a prejudice against a race, ethnic group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender or sexual identity.”
The data also indicated an increase in religion-based hate crimes by 7%, while crimes against Jews or Jewish institutions increased by 14%.
The murder of 22 people in a shooting at Walmart, Texas, in August last year was the most egregious hate crime monitored by the FBI, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.
Blacks are targeted for hate crimes more than other groups in the United States. Even so, the FBI report indicated that the rate of hate crimes against African Americans decreased slightly in 2019 to 1,930 crimes compared to 1,943 crimes in 2018.
Among the total number of hate crimes committed for reasons of racial or ethnic prejudice, which totaled 4,930 last year, the report indicated that 48.5% of its victims “were the targets of crimes motivated by hatred of blacks or African Americans.” . This is in contrast to 15.7 percent of those who were targeted for “white hate” crimes.
After the publication of this report, human rights groups called for better methods of reporting hate crimes and gathering information about them.
A press release from the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, said that the data referred to in this report sheds light on a “horrifying trend of increasing hate crimes in the United States, even as fewer law enforcement agencies provide the FBI with relevant data. ” “.
“The full severity of the effects and harms of hate crimes cannot be fully measured without fully participating in the FBI’s data collection process,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League.
