FBI Uniform Crime Reports – Hate Crime Statistics

Description:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program compiles standardized incident reports from local law enforcement agencies in order to produce reliable, uniform, and national crime data. The UCR Program is voluntary, and includes data for only counties and cities with population over 10,000. As a result, coverage is not universal. The UCR Program collects data on known offenses and persons arrested by law enforcement agencies. The UCR Program does not record the findings of a court, coroner, jury, or the decision of a prosecutor.

The Hate Crime Statistics Program within the FBI’s (UCR) Program collects data regarding criminal offenses that were motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, ethnicity, ancestry, gender, gender identity, religion, disability or sexual orientation and were committed against persons, property, or society. Hate crime data is captured by including the element of bias in offenses already being reported to the UCR Program. State hate crime counts reflect the sum of all reported offenses from agencies within the state that submitted data to the FBI. The state population count used in the rate calculations is the total population of the state as reported in the Census’s Population Estimates Program. The State of Hawaii does not participate in the Hate Crime Statistics Program. Due to variation in reporting and hate crime definitions changing over time, FBI hate crime statistics should not be compared across states, and should not be compared from one year to another. An agency can report up to four bias motivation types per offense. Multiple-bias offenses are not common, but when they occur, they are double-counted in the value of the total number of hate crimes.