Some 6,222 hate-crime incidents involving 7,254 offenses were reported last year, the FBI said today. That compared to 6,628 criminal incidents and 7,699 offenses reported for 2010, but trends can’t be reliably inferred because so few law-enforcement agencies file the voluntary reports. About 47 percent of the incidents were motivated by racial bias, about the same as 2010. Last year, only 1,944 of the 14,575 participating law enforcement agencies reported any hate crimes, meaning that 87 percent of agencies said there were no hate crimes in their jurisdictions.
Of the remaining reports, 20.8 percent were motivated by a sexual orientation bias, 19.8 percent by a religious bias, and 11.6 percent by an ethnicity/national origin bias. Bias against a disability accounted for 0.9 percent of single-bias incidents. Breaking down the offenses by type, 4,623 were crimes against persons, of which 45.6 percent were intimidation, 34.5 percent were simple assaults for 34.5 percent, and 19.4 percent were aggravated assaults. Of the offenders, 59 percent of the 5,731 known offenders were white and 20.9 percent were black. The rest were unknown or other races.