Throughout history, hate crimes have jeopardized the safety of minority groups in America. Centuries later, they still prove to be a persisting problem. The FBI has defined hate crimes as "criminal offense[s] against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias". These biases could mean the victim's race or ethnicity, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability. We have curated a set of visualizations to help better understand the underlying trends and patterns of hate crimes in America.

Hate Crimes Through the Years

In general, the number of hate crimes each year has fluctuated from year-to-year since 1996 (when hate crimes were first recorded by the FBI). Overall, we can note a general downward trend in hate crimes since 1996. However, we've also started to see a recent uptick in hate crimes since dipping in 2014.

Scroll through to see how the amount of hate crimes in the U.S. has changed over time.

Hate crimes were relatively high in the late 1990s, often ranging from 8,000 to 10,000 hate crimes a year. We can see how hate crimes remained high at the end of a decade where the modern militia movement found its footing, neo-Nazism gained popularity among radical right groups, and the Internet became realized as a tool for hate. We can see a particular peak in 2001, coinciding with the terrorist events of 9/11.

Under the Bush presidency, hate crimes were relatively steady with occasional fluctuations into 2008. However, we can still see slight exceptions, notably in 2005 with a decrease in yearly hate crimes to ~7,000 hate crimes. This decrease may be a consequence of factors such as Hurricane Katrina as communities came together in support.

As the 2010s came around, hate crimes began to decline consistently, eventually hitting a low of ~5,500 hate crimes a year in 2014. This stark decrease in hate crimes coincides well with events such as the start of the Obama presidency that started in 2008.

In the past few years, hate crimes have steadily risen back to levels nearly paralleling the 1990s. Alongside the rise in popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the deaths of various African Americans and the start of the Trump campaign/presidency, hate crimes have grown more frequent and prevalent in recent years.

When we focus on the past 10 years specifically, we can see large fluctuations in the amount of hate crimes throughout the decade. These changes have many different causes and factors which we may be able to better understand when we take a closer look at the specifics.

Detailed Hate Crime Trends

Aside from looking at just the yearly trends for hate crime numbers, it is also important to understand how those numbers are split across different bias motivations, such as race or religion.

The following visualization presents the total number of reported hate crime offenses from 2010 to 2019 for each bias motivation defined by the FBI dataset.
*Note: multi or multiple-bias incidents are incidents in which the offender is motivated by two or more biases (ex. both race and religion). For more information on how categories are defined, see the Sources section.

Click on a category to view its breakdown and use the slider to see yearly changes.

Key Insights

Click on an insight to view.
  • Throughout the years, we can see that the number of hate crimes motivated by race/ancestry/ethnicity always ranks the highest, with black people experiencing the most attacks within the category.
  • The largest increase in hate crimes motivated by multiple biases (+217) and race/ancestry/ethnicity (+603) occurred between 2016 and 2017. Anti-Black or African American (+236) and Anti-American Indian or Alaska Native (+120) incidents account for most of the increase in race-related hate crimes during that period.
  • The ranking for sexual orientation's breakdown essentially remains the same throughout the years, except for 2017, when the number of reported anti-heterosexual incidents overtook the number of reported anti-bisexual incidents.

Above, we focused on looking at the victims of hate crime, and how their race, religion, sexuality, and such made them a target of hate. But what about the perpetrators behind these crimes? Let's take a closer look at the relationships between an offender's race/ethnicity and the types of crime they commit and under which bias motivations as described by the same FBI dataset. The below visualization focuses on the most recent published year, 2019.
*Note: In order to not overcrowd the diagram, unknown offender and unknown race/ethnicity data is not displayed. For more information on how categories are defined, see the Sources section.

Click on a slice in the inner layer to zoom in. Click the center of the diagram to zoom back out.
Toggle a different variable to display for the second layer by clicking on the desired filter.

Offense Type
Race
Religion
Sexual Orientation
Disability
Gender
Gender Identity




Questions to Explore

Click on a question for the answer.
  1. What are the top three Offense Types for the majority of the offender race/ethnicities?
    Answer: Assault, intimidation, and destruction
  2. Under Race, which two races/ethnicities committed more reported crimes against white people than black people?
    Answer: Black and American Indian or Alaska Native
  3. What are the top two targeted Religions of hate crime, other than "Anti-Other Religion"?
    Answer: Anti-Jewish and Anti-Islam (Muslim)
  4. Which Sexual Orientation has the most reported hate crimes for all offender races/ethnicities?
    Answer: Anti-Gay (Male)
  5. Are there more crimes targeting physical or mental Disabilities? Is the result surprising to you?
    Answer: Anti-Mental
  6. What about for Gender and Gender Identity? Are these results unexpected?
    Answer: Anti-Female and Anti-Transgender, respectively

The Unreported

Hate Crime Laws Across States

The FBI lists five main categories of bias motivations: Race/Religion/Ethnicity, Sexual Orientation, Disability, Gender, and Gender Identity. However, not all 50 states in America recognize every category in hate-related statutes. A number of states are Fully Inclusive for which they recognizes all five. But a majority of states are Non-Inclusive for which not all five categories are recognized. On the extreme end, four states in particular, Wyoming, Indiana, Arkansas, and South Carolina are Not Protected for which none of the five categories are recognized.


Unreported Hate Crimes

Unfortunately, not all law enforcement agencies in the U.S. report hate crimes. This could be because of lack of training for local jurisdictions to properly recognize hate crimes, or the failure to investigate and prosecute these crimes. For instance:

This means that only a fraction of the country's annual hate crimes have been reported, leaving large gaps within the data.

In 2015, there were

reported hate crime incidents according to FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program.
However, the National Criminal Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates that the actual number is closer to



Each dot represents around incidents.

The estimated number is about times more than the reported number.

There are many possible reasons to explain the disparity between the reported and estimated number. For one, hate crime victims may not report the incidents because they don't know what qualifies as a hate crime, they fear reliving their traumatic experiences during the reporting process or victims' distrust of law enforcements.




The Stories

It is important to realize that each hate crime incident is not merely a number: it is a story and an experience, and often a traumatic one.

*Note: Includes articles from 2011 up to November 22nd, 2020.

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Resources

We hope you were able to gain some insight into America's hate crime problem. Below are some resources for victims of hate crimes as well as further readings to learn more:

Note: This project was only able to consolidate and visualize the data from reported, hate-related crimes. However, the conversation around hate needs to go far beyond the scope of this project. There is a need for better data collection and transparency to understand hate and to intervene, before and after, the ramifications resulted from hate.

"... hate is a feeling — a condition. These feelings precede actions, and we must further recognize that only a tiny fraction of hate-related acts can be categorized as crimes. And if we wait until these acts become crimes, it's already too late."
    — Jonathan Albright, Hate Almost-Crimes and the Rise of Inter-Nationalism

Sources

About Us

Authors

Emily Wang:
Hank Tadeusiak:
Jennifer Wang:
Justin Bao:
Xuan You Lim:

Special Thanks

This project was created for the course CSE 442: Data Visualization, at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering within the University of Washington.
Special thanks to our professors Jeffrey Heer and Jane Hoffswell, and our teaching assistants Chanwut (Mick) Kittivorawong, Kevin Chang, Naveena Karusala, and Yang Liu.