Washington: The Justice Department released new data on hate crimes in 2020, compiled from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, which captured just a fraction of bias-motivated attacks self-reported by Asian Americans. Nonetheless, the UCR data showed a marked rise in bias-motivated crimes against Indian Americans, specifically Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. Seventy-one Sikh Americans were victims of a hate crime in 2020; 47 offenders targeted the community in 67 attacks, as reported by the FBI. This marks a huge jump from 2019: 50 Sikh Americans were the target of hate crimes.
Alarmingly, the number of hate crimes against Hindu Americans has jumped by more than 500 per cent, from just two in 2019, to 11 in 2020. Six offenders participated in 11 attacks against Hindu Americans. The FBI logged 15 hate-motivated attacks against Buddhists in 2020. Surprisingly, the number of hate crimes against Muslim Americans dropped by half: 121 offenders participated in 104 attacks against Muslims, rendering 124 victims.
The FBI has dis-aggregated data for Hindus and Sikhs since 2016. A total of 324 hate-related incidents targeting Asian Americans were reported by the FBI, a tiny fraction of the self-reported incidents collected on the Web portal Stop AAPI Hate, which was launched last year as the Asian American community increasingly became the target of violence amid the Covid pandemic. Former President Donald Trump demonized Asian Americans for “creating” Covid, repeatedly calling it the “China virus” and “Kung flu.”
As of the end of June, Stop AAPI Hate had collected more than 6,600 reports of bias on its portal, in several languages, including Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu. Local law enforcement agencies around the country voluntarily submit their data to the FBI for the Uniform Crime Report. Reporting is not mandated: less than 12 per cent of law enforcement agencies around the country submit their hate crime incidents to the FBI.
Former FBI agent Michael German noted that the vast majority of hate crimes go unreported. Prosecutors are reluctant to charge an offender with a hate crime, as the burden of proof - that the crime began with the intent of hate - is difficult to prove. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison explained the difficulty of charging a hate crime during an interview in which he discussed his prosecution of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of the murder of George Floyd. Ellison was asked why he did not charge Chauvin with a hate crime. “Hate crimes are crimes which have the explicit motive of bias,” said Ellison. “There was no evidence that Chauvin had factored in Floyd’s race.”
For 2020, 10,532 hate offenses were reported to the FBI, with 10,681 victims by 6,431 known offenders; more than 55 per cent of the perpetrators were White. Of those offenses, 4,939 were motivated by race or ethnicity, while 1,174 were motivated by religion. The 2020 data reflects a slight drop in hate crimes motivated by religion: in 2019, 1,521 incidents were motivated by religion. Race and ethnicity bias was by far the largest motivator for committing a hate crime, according to FBI data.
