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. Commissioned by the Attorney General and aided by 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 for that purpose. Hate Crime Statistics, 1990: A Resource Book was the first publication that made available the hate crime data collected in 1990 by 11 individual states. Once the national UCR Program implemented a uniform data collection method, the 1992 edition of Hate Crime Statistics premiered the data reported by law enforcement agencies across the Nation.

Bias against persons with disabilities became an element of hate crime data collection guidelines with the enactment of the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which amended the Hate Crime Statistics Act. (Actual collection of data from disability bias-motivated crimes began on January 1, 1997.) Another amendment followed in July 1996 when the Church Arson Prevention Act was signed into law, removing the sunset clause from the original statute and permanently extending the data collection mandate. The FBI shares its commitment to make hate crime data collection a permanent part of the UCR Program with each law enforcement agency that is a voluntary participant of the Program.

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 types of the victim(s) and offender(s). While identifying the criteria that distinguish hate crimes from other offenses, the parties 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 decided that collecting additional information about crimes currently 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 imperative in that 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 local law enforcement agency's participation in reporting bias-motivated offenses so that this information can be forwarded to the state and subsequently to the national Program.

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

Participation

In 1999, nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide reported data to the UCR Program. A total of 12,122 law enforcement agencies in 48 states and the District of Columbia submitted summary or incident-based reports to the Hate Crime Data Collection Program. The table below shows the number of agencies represented within each population group and the extent of the population covered. Of those participating agencies, most sent their data to their respective state UCR Programs (see Appendix) that 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 233 million people in the United States, approximately 85 percent of the population. Though the reports from these agencies are insufficient to allow valid national or regional measure of the volume and types of crimes motivated by hate, they offer perspectives on the general nature of hate crime occurrence.

Historically, the law enforcement community has 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 hate crime statistics at the local level, law enforcement agencies have the ability to heighten the awareness and the understanding of bias-motivated crimes both locally and nationwide.

Number of Agencies
by Population Group, 1999

Population                                  Number of        Population
group                                     participating        covered
                                            agencies

Total                                           12,122      232,829,887

Group I (Cities 250,000 and over)                   63       46,170,286
Group II (Cities 100,000-249,999)                  138       20,181,077
Group III (Cities 50,000-99,999)                   352       24,009,970
Group IV (Cities 25,000-49,999)                    662       22,751,314
Group V (Cities 10,000-24,999)                   1,521       23,964,721
Group VI (1) (Cities under 10,000)               6,036       19,908,509
Suburban Counties (2)                            1,111       50,935,884
Rural Counties (2)                               2,239       24,908,126

(1) Includes universities and colleges to which no population is
attributed.

(2) Includes state police agencies and other agencies to which no
population is attributed.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Federal Bureau of Investigation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group