FBI Sees Upward Trend in Reported Hate Crimes

More than 11,800 incidents of hate crime were reported to the FBI in the United States in 2023. The FBI defines a hate crime as a "crime motivated by bias against race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability".

The 2023 figure of 11,862 is a two percent increase from 2022, when 11,634 cases were reported. As the following chart shows, after a spike in hate crimes reported in 2001 following 9/11, cases started to decline in the early 2000s. In the last decade though, there has been an upwards trend once more, with a notable jump between 2019-2020. FBI data shows that year included an uptick in violence against Asian Americans (73 percent increase, from 161 reported cases in 2019 to 279 cases in 2020). However, anti-Black or African American hate crimes continued to be the largest bias incident victim category, with 2,871 incidents in 2020, a 49 percent increase from 2019.

The latest FBI report shows that the number of reported incidents fell under several other categories of crime between 2022 and 2023. Murder cases fell by 11.6 percent, rape by 9.4 percent, aggravated assault by 2.8 percent and robbery by 0.3 percent. In terms of property crime trends, there was a 7.6 percent decrease in incidents of burglary and 4.4 percent fall in cases of larceny. There was a 12.4 percent increase in cases of motor vehicle theft.

It is important to note here that caution should be taken when interpreting the data since 2021 due to the FBI’s transition to using the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which still is yet to have all law enforcement agencies start to use the system. According to the FBI, if looking at data from agencies with more regular reporting, hate crime cases even fell by 0.6 percent from 10,687 in 2022 to 10,627 in 2023.