More than 55,000 people a year believe their gender and gender identity made them hate crime victims. So why did police departments nationwide only report 215 such bias incidents last year?
Why Police Struggle to Report One of The Fastest-Growing Hate Crimes | The Marshall Project
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/11/26/why-police-struggle-to-report-one-of-the-fastest-growing-hate-cr
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If you ask people across the country whether they have been a victim of a bias crime because of their gender or gender identity, tens of thousands have stories to tell.
An analysis from the Justice Department estimates that between 2013 and 2017 more than 55,000 hate crimes targeting victims’ gender took place on average each year. That’s almost 30 percent of all hate crimes reported by victims.
But you wouldn’t know that from the most recent hate crime statistics released earlier this month by the FBI. The new data show that last year police departments around the country reported 215 gender-related hate crimes targeting men, women, transgender and nonbinary people. They represented 3 percent of the total incidents in the FBI’s numbers.
Police reports and the victims surveys capture different aspects of the criminal justice system. The survey asks American households each year about their experience with crime, whereas the FBI collects numbers from local police departments that voluntarily participate in its Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
Last year, more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies provided hate crime figures to the FBI, and more than 80 percent of them—including every agency in the state of Alabama—reported that no hate crimes occurred in their jurisdictions at all.