Introduction.

Background

With the passage of the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, Congress mandated the collection of information about crimes motivated by a bias against a person's race, religion, sexual orientation, and/or ethnicity/national origin. Under the commission of the Attorney General and with the aid of several local and state law enforcement agencies already investigating and collecting information about hate crimes, the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program developed a data collection system for that purpose. Hate Crime Statistics, 1990: A Resource Book was the first publication that made available the hate crime data collected in 1990 by 11 individual states. Once the national UCR Program implemented a uniform data collection method, the 1992 edition of Hate Crime Statistics premiered the data reported by law enforcement agencies across the Nation.

Bias against persons with disabilities became an element of hate crime data collection with the enactment of the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which amended the Hate Crime Statistics Act. (Actual collection of data from disability bias-motivated crimes began on January 1, 1997.) Another amendment followed in July 1996 when the Church Arson Prevention Act was signed into law, removing the sunset clause from the original statute and permanently extending the data collection mandate. The FBI shares with each law enforcement agency that is a voluntary participant of the Program its commitment to make hate crime data collection a permanent part of the UCR Program.

Collection Design

The goal of the Hate Crime Statistics Act and its subsequent amendments is to capture information about the type of bias serving as the motivating factor of a hate crime, the nature of the offense, and the number and types of the victim(s) and offender(s). While identifying the criteria that distinguish hate crimes from other offenses, the parties involved in the developmental phase of the Hate Crime Data Collection Program recognized that hate crimes are not separate, distinct crimes; instead, they are traditional offenses motivated by the offender's bias. An offender, for example, may damage or vandalize property because of his/her bias against the owner's (victim's) race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/ national origin, or disability. Therefore, rather than create new crime categories, Program developers felt that collecting additional information about crimes currently being reported to the UCR Program would fulfill the directives addressed in the Hate Crime Statistics Act as amended.

Because motivation is subjective, it is difficult to know with certainty whether a crime was the result of the offender's bias. Law enforcement investigation is imperative in that it must reveal sufficient evidence as to whether or not the offender's actions were motivated, in whole or in part, by bias. For this reason, the success of the Program rests with the law enforcement officers who determine that a bias motivation does indeed exist and forward this information to the national Program so that the law enforcement community and others may learn from it.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Sheriffs' Association, the former UCR Data Providers' Advisory Policy Board (now part of the Criminal Justice Information Services Advisory Policy Board), the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training, and the Association of State Uniform Crime Reporting Programs have all endorsed the Hate Crime Data Collection Program. Without their support and law enforcement's voluntary data collection, any effort toward the successful implementation of the Program would be futile.

Participation

In 2000, nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide reported data to the UCR Program. A total of 11,690 law enforcement agencies in 48 states and the District of Columbia submitted summary or incident-based reports to the Hate Crime Data Collection Program. The table below shows the number of agencies represented within each population group and the extent of the population covered. Of the agencies participating in this Program, most sent their data to their respective state UCR Programs (see Appendix) that, in turn, forwarded the state's information to the national Program. Participating agencies in states without state UCR Programs sent their data directly to the FBI. Collectively, these agencies represented 236.9 million people in the United States, 84.2 percent of the population. Though the reports from these agencies are insufficient to allow a valid national or regional measure of the volume and types of crimes motivated by hate, they offer perspectives on the general nature of hate crime occurrence.

The law enforcement community has long recognized that valid information is central to developing effective measures to deal with crime; the same is true for bias-motivated crime. Through the collection of local hate crime statistics, law enforcement agencies have the ability to heighten the awareness and the understanding of bias-motivated crimes both locally and nationwide.

Number of Participating Agencies and Population Covered
by Population Group, 2000

                                            Number of
Population group                      participating agencies

Total                                         11,690

Group I (Cities 250,000 and over)                 64
Group II (Cities 100,000-249,999)                155
Group III (Cities 50,000-99,999)                 357
Group IV (Cities 25,000-49,999)                  682
Group V (Cities 10,000-24,999)                 1,527
Group VI (1) (Cities under 10,000)             5,731
Suburban Counties (2)                          1,057
Rural Counties (2)                             2,117

                                            Population
Population group                             covered

Total                                      236,929,512

Group I (Cities 250,000 and over)           48,620,572
Group II (Cities 100,000-249,999)           22,692,156
Group III (Cities 50,000-99,999)            24,324,241
Group IV (Cities 25,000-49,999)             23,622,944
Group V (Cities 10,000-24,999)              23,991,596
Group VI (1) (Cities under 10,000)          19,012,664
Suburban Counties (2)                       50,765,022
Rural Counties (2)                          23,900,317

(1) Includes universities and colleges, state police agencies, and
other agencies to which no population is attributed.

(2) Includes state police agencies and other agencies to which no
population is attributed.