San Francisco Blog

Civil rights leaders have criticized the FBI hate crime report for grossly underestimating the number of hate crimes. The much more comprehensive Justice Department study, also released this month, lists 190,000 hate crimes per year compared to just 7,722 hate crimes in the FBI report.

The Justice Department statistics show that whites and Hispanics are more likely to be victims of hate crimes than blacks: “Per capital rates of hate crime victimization varied little by race or ethnicity: about 0.9 per 1,000 whites, 0.7 percent blacks, and 0.9 percent Hispanics.” The Justice Department numbers alos reveal that whites (including Hispanics) make up only 43 percent of hate crime offenders, even though they make up nearly 80 percent of the population. It identifies 38.8 percent of hate crime offenders as black, even though blacks make up only about 12 to 13 percent of the population. By contrast, the FBI numbers identified 58.6 percent of hate crimes offenders as white and 20.6 percent of hate crime offenders as black.

The FBI's ranking of states with the highest rates of hate crime statistics seems accurate, since the states at or near the top of the list are also the scenes of the ugliest racial incidents. The South has never experienced anti-black or anti-Hispanic race riots on the scale of those in California and in Midwestern and Northwestern states. School integration went much smoother in the South than it did in Northern states. White flight on the heels of school integration had not been nearly as pronounced in Southern States as in the North. Detroit, for example, turned almost 100 percent black within a decade of court-ordered school integration. The integration of Boston schools in the 1960s was accompanied by much greater violent than the integration of Little Rock schools in the 1950s.