Source: FBI
Over half of religious bias crimes target Jews, FBI says in new report
lmost 60 percent of hate crimes based on religious bias were motivated by antisemitism, the FBI reported on Tuesday as part of its annual Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program.
In 2018, the year covered by the FBI’s most recent report, 57.8 percent of religious bias offenses were categorized as anti-Jewish. A total of 896 anti-Jewish offenses were reported to local and federal law enforcement agencies, forming a data set that is ultimately collected and released by the bureau.
Although thousands of agencies participate in the hate crimes reporting program, such participation is voluntary at the local level, meaning that the data underestimate the larger number of such crimes committed in smaller jurisdictions.
The number of anti-Jewish offenses dropped off in 2018 from the previous year, when there were 976. But the share of offenses directed against Jews or those perceived as Jewish remained consistent. About 58 percent of religious bias crimes in 2017 had an anti-Semitic motivation, roughly the same share as in 2018.
In 2016, 834 offenses were classified as anti-Jewish and constituted about 54 percent of all religious bias offenses included in the FBI’s UCR statistics.
The number of religious bias crimes, like the number of bias crimes in general, has risen sharply in recent years. In 2015, 6,837 bias offenses were recorded by the FBI, 1,354 of which were motivated by religion. By 2018, the overall number surged to 8,327, with 1,550 arising from religious bias.
The largest category of bias offenses collected by the FBI involved crimes targeting race, ethnicity or ancestry. The UCR report tallied nearly 5,000 of these offenses in 2018, a plurality of which targeted black people. There were just over 1,400 bias offenses targeting sexual orientation in the report, a majority of which targeted gay men.
Hate Crime Statistics, 2018, is available on the FBI’s website at https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2018.
