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 to comply with the Congressional mandate. Hate Crime Statistics, 1990: A Resource Book was the first publication that made available the hate crime data reported by 11 individual states that had collected hate crime data under state authority during 1990 and that were willing to participate. After the national UCR Program implemented a uniform method of data collection, the 1992 edition of Hate Crime Statistics premiered the data reported by participating law enforcement agencies across the Nation.

The Hate Crime Statistics Act was amended with the enactment of the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 to include bias against persons with disabilities. The FBI began collecting data for this additional bias motivation on January 1, 1997. Another amendment followed in July 1996 when the Church Arson Prevention Act was signed into law, removing the sunset clause (a clause requiring a review of the rationale for continuing the act) from the original statute and permanently extending the data collection mandate. As a result, the FBI has made hate crime data collection a permanent part of the UCR Program and continues to encourage the voluntary participation of each law enforcement agency.

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 type of victim(s) and offender(s). As they identified the criteria that distinguish hate crimes from other offenses, those 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 already 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 critical to the determination process because it must reveal sufficient evidence as to whether 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.

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 endorsed the Hate Crime Data Collection Program. Without their support and law enforcement's voluntary data collection, any effort toward the success of the Program would be futile.

Participation

In 2001, nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide reported data to the national UCR Program. Of that total, 11,987 agencies in 49 states and the District of Columbia submitted reports to the Hate Crime Data Collection Program. The following table shows the number of participating agencies represented within each population group and the U.S. population covered in each group. 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 nearly 241.8 million people in the United States or 85 percent of the country's population. Although not a scientifically selected sample, these data offer perspectives on the general nature of hate crime occurrences.

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, 2001

                                                        Number of
Population group                                      participating
                                                         agencies

Total                                                     11,987

Group I (Cities 250,000 and over)                             65
Group II (Cities 100,000-249,999)                            153
Group III (Cities 50,000-99,999)                             369
Group IV (Cities 25,000-49,999)                              684
Group V (Cities 10,000-24,999)                             1,498
Group VI (1) (Cities under 10,000)                         5,939
Suburban Counties (2)                                      1,079
Rural Counties (2)                                         2,200

                                                      Population
Population group                                        covered

Total                                                241,799,615

Group I (Cities 250,000 and over)                     49,590,648
Group II (Cities 100,000-249,999)                     22,838,311
Group III (Cities 50,000-99,999)                      25,417,662
Group IV (Cities 25,000-49,999)                       23,843,439
Group V (Cities 10,000-24,999)                        23,755,608
Group VI (1) (Cities under 10,000)                    19,126,247
Suburban Counties (2)                                 51,923,480
Rural Counties (2)                                    25,304,220

(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.