FBI report: Hate crimes in U.S. hit record high in 2021

Hate crimes in the United States rose in 2021 to the highest level since the federal government began tracking the data more than three decades ago, the FBI said Monday in a new report that also reflected a record spike in attacks targeting people of Asian descent.

States and local jurisdictions reported 10,840 bias-motivated crimes, up nearly 25% from 2020 and significantly more than the previous high of 9,730 tallied in 2001.

The data showed increases in crimes targeting all major categories, including racial minorities, religious groups and the gay and lesbian community. There were 746 attacks targeting people of Asian descent in 2021, up from 249 a year earlier and the most ever recorded in a single year.

“This is a horrifying record that is greater than what we saw in 2001,” said Brian Levin, who is director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino and tracks hate-crime data.

“What this establishes, along with our research, is that we have hit an inflection point now, in this decade, in regards to hate crimes that we haven’t seen since modern data collection began,” Levin said in an interview Monday. “The significance of this is that there are now multiple years of increases.”

Levin said his center has collected data from nearly three dozen big cities that shows continued increases in hate crimes in 2022.

The FBI report came amid additional data from local jurisdictions since December, when the agency released an incomplete report for 2021 hate crimes citing the difficulties many state and local law enforcement agencies had in complying with a new federal reporting system. FBI officials told reporters on a telephone briefing Monday that they sought to obtain a more complete picture of national trends after the initial deadline.

The spike in hate crimes comes as

U.S. intelligence officials have warned in recent years of increasing domestic threats from white nationalist groups and extremists. The Justice Department has begun to increase federal prosecutions of hate crimes and taken other steps to improve reporting of such crimes, including increasing access to federal portals in foreign languages and bolstering community outreach.

“Hate crimes and the devastation they cause communities have no place in this country,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a written statement Monday. “The Justice Department is committed to every tool and resource at our disposal to combat bias-motivated violence in all its forms.”