Methodology: data reporting.

In accordance with the Hate Crime Statistics Act and its subsequent amendments, the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program compiles data regarding crimes motivated by racial, religious, disability, sexual-orientation, and ethnicity/national origin biases. Law enforcement agencies report hate crime occurences to the UCR Program using the Quarterly Hate Crime Report form or the hate crime data element for the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The Quarterly Hate Crime Report form consists of a quarterly summary report and an incident report for each bias-motivated incident. The form is typically used by agencies that report their data by using summary guidelines. Agencies participating in NIBRS are able to report via magnetic tape an offender's bias motivation using the hate crime data element in their NIBRS submissions. Individual agencies and state UCR Programs that use personal computers for data collection and storage may submit hate crime data on disks.

Data Collection

Criminal incidents can involve more than one offense, victim, and/or offender. For counting purposes, one offense is counted for each victim of a crime against the person. One offense is counted for each occurence of crime against property and crime against society, regardless of the number of victims. The total number of victims in a given incident is the sum of victims associated with each offense that took place within the incident.

Hate crime data are collected for 11 offense categories. Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, simple assault, and intimidation are classified as crimes against persons. Robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, arson, and destruction/damage/vandalism of property are classified as crimes against property.

In NIBRS, the hate crime data element applies to all 46 Group "A" Offenses, which include the previously mentioned 11 offense categories. The remaining 35 Group "A" Offenses not listed are reported in this publication as other or as crimes against society, whichever is appropriate.

Data Compilation

Once the national UCR Program receives the data, the Program staff compile these data in tables and discuss them in narrative comments that address the volume and types of bias-motivated criminal incidents. In particular, Section I provides various tabular presentations of the incidents reported to the FBI. It also addresses the specific offenses, types of victims, and known offenders' races. The first line of the title of each table presents in boldface type that table's unit of count, i.e., incident, offense, victim, known offender. Section II furnishes individual state and agency information, including the number of quarters the agency reported data to the national Program.

Data Publication

To be included in this publication, law enforcement agencies must have submitted data for at least one month of the calendar year. The published data, therefore, do not necessarily represent complete 12 months, or four quarters, of reporting for every agency listed. In 2000, 91.9 percent of the reporting agencies contributed data for all four quarters. Data users should exercise caution in attempting direct comparisons of hate crime totals among agencies because many variables not mentioned in this publication affect the volume and type of crime from place to place.