FBI Study Makes It Official: All Trends Point To Rise In Hate Crimes Against Latinos

In case you needed more evidence than what we’ve already given you (vis. NPR’s report and the recent murder of Marcello Lucero), the FBI homepage has hard data on the worrying trend of rising incidents of violence against Latinos. Their report from 2007 (no report yet from 2008, since we still have another month and a half of potential criminal activity left) breaks down all hate crimes reported in America, classifying them by state, motivation and race of the offender, among other things. The FBI’s reported data, though often criticized for being incomplete, serves to illustrate the distinct rise in hate crimes against Latinos. What it doesn’t touch on are the reasons why more hate crimes are being committed against Latinos, but the numbers at least help us to get a fix on where, who and what.

First, a quick disclaimer: a 2005 study on hate crime reporting by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed that the actual number of hate crimes was about 20 to 30 times greater than what the FBI had reported. So the actual numbers in the following data are less important than the trends they form, or the ratios they are a part of. On to the numbers!

• For 2007, the FBI reports that of 1,256 incidents that could be definitively classed as motivated by perceived ethnicity of the victim, 61% of these were motivated by an anti-Hispanic bias.
• The types of crime, in order from most prevalent to least prevalent: intimidation, simple assault, aggravated assault, vandalism.
• Out of 775 incidents motivated by anti-Hispanic sentiment, where the race of the offender was known, 405 were committed by whites and 157 by blacks.
• The top five states for hate crimes are: California with 1,400, New Jersey with 748, Michigan with 627, New York with 493 and Massachusetts with 353. These numbers are of course dependent on state population and the thoroughness of reporting agencies. Full table of hate crimes by state, with population and reporting agency numbers, here.

For more data, check out the FBI’s homepage on Hate Crime statistics.

Anti-Latino Hate Crimes Rise for Fourth Year in a Row [SPLC]