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Press Release
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The Justice Department issued following statement from Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta on the FBI’s announcement of the 2021 hate crime statistics supplement:
“Preventing, investigating and prosecuting hate crimes are top priorities for the Justice Department, and reporting is key to each of those priorities. The FBI’s supplemental report demonstrates our unwavering commitment to work with our state and local partners to increase reporting and provide a more complete picture of hate crimes nationwide. We will not stop here: We are continuing to work with state and local law enforcement agencies across the country to increase the reporting of hate crime statistics to the FBI. Hate crimes and the devastation they cause communities have no place in this country. The Justice Department is committed to every tool and resource at our disposal to combat bias-motivated violence in all its forms.”
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Additional information on hate crime statistics collection:
The FBI’s 2021 Hate Crime Statistics Supplemental Report released in December 2022, was the first year using annual hate crimes statistics reported entirely through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Compared to the previous crime data collection system, NIBRS collects significantly more detailed data for each individual criminal incident. Since 2016, the Justice Department has worked with law enforcement agencies to assist in their transition to reporting crime data through NIBRS, including allocating over $120 million in grants to support agencies’ transition.
As a result of the shift to NIBRS-only data collection, law enforcement agency participation in submitting all crime statistics, including hate crimes, fell significantly from 2020 to 2021. Several of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies, as well as some states, did not make the transition to NIBRS in time to submit data prior to the reporting deadline, and were not included in the 2021 Hate Crime Statistics.
In order to increase agency participation for the 2021 data year, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program accepted hate crime data submissions from the summary reporting data collection system and additional NIBRS hate crime reports from 3,025 agencies that covered a combined population of 87,239,467 to help compile this supplemental report. As a result, 14,859 agencies covering 91.1% of the population are represented in this report compared to the 11,834 agencies representing 64.8% represented in the December 2022 report. Nationally, reported hate crime incidents increased 11.6% from 2020 to 2021.
Steps taken by the Justice Department since January 2021 in response to a rise in hate crimes and hate incidents include:
More information about the department’s response to hate crimes is available here.