The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/tag/hate-crimes/)
Scores of federal law enforcement agencies are ignoring a longstanding legal mandate to submit statistics to the FBI’s national hate crimes database, calling into question the veracity of what is supposed to be the nation’s most comprehensive source of information on hate crimes.
At least six states are considering new laws to tamp down the wave of hate that has washed over the country since the caustic presidential election. One expert says some Americans “are reverting back to a kind of tribalism and acting out with hate crimes or acts of uncivilized bigotry.”
Kentucky’s “Blue Lives Matter” law makes it a hate crime to target police officers, a legislative trend sweeping a number of states. At the same time, lawmakers in New York, Connecticut and Illinois are responding to surging reports of hate crimes against racial, religious and ethnic minorities by trying to strengthen laws and policies that target criminal bias.
The nonprofit news organization says it is looking into reports of 250 incidents of “blatantly anti-Semitic activity in the real world – that doesn’t include online – in the three months after President Trump was elected.”
Jake Turx was trying to ask the president about a frightening wave of coordinated bomb threats at Jewish venues. Trump stopped Turx, saying it was “not a fair question.” Instead of answering, Trump declared himself “the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life.”
Nearly 15,000 hate crime were reported from July to September 2016, up more than 25 percent from the year before. the most cases were reported in Manchester, West Yorkshire and London, and Poles and other Eastern Europeans were common targets.
Hate crime charges are filed in attack by four blacks on 18-year-old man in Chicago. People with disabilities are subject to violent crimes at three times the rate of their non-disabled peers.
Police shootings and former Dallas Chief David O. Brown head TCR’s list of top criminal justice stories and newsmakers for 2016. Readers and contributors also selected Donald Trump’s election win, the bipartisan justice reform movement in the states, and the probe into Russian election hackers as among the 10 developments that bear watching next year.
Reports of hate crimes of all types increased about 7 percent last year. But incidents directed toward Muslims soared 67 percent in 2015 over 2014. The FBI’s annual report documented 257 anti-Muslim hate crimes — up from 154 in 2014 — and 5,850 total incidents reported to police last year, up from 5,479 incidents.
George Washington University’s Program on Extremism found that 18 prominent white nationalist accounts, including that of the American Nazi Party, have seen a sharp increase in Twitter followers to a total of more than 25,000, up from about 3,500 in 2012.