Updated FBI report on 2020 hate crimes show a 73% increase in anti-Asian incidents

The FBI reported that hate crimes against Asians rose 73% during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Updated 2020 numbers: The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program updated its 2020 hate crime statistics about nationwide “bias-motivated incidents” on Monday.

The FBI cited technical issues as the reason for the inaccuracies in the original 2020 hate crime statistics.
“Only partial Ohio data for 2020 were released,” an FBI press release stated. “For that reason, modifications were made to Ohio’s hate crime data in the FBI’s database following the release.”
The updated 2020 data was submitted by 15,138 law enforcement agencies, providing information about the offenses, victims, offenders and locations of hate crimes.

The report documents 8,263 criminal incidents and 11,129 related offenses as being motivated by bias toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender and gender identity.

The report shows that 61.8% of victims were targeted because of the offenders’ race/ethnicity/ancestry bias.

Of the 6,780 known offenders, 55.1% were white, and 21.2% were Black or African American, 1.1% were Asian, 1% were American Indian or Alaska Native, 0.5% were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander and 5.4% were of a group of multiple races.

The bureau also reported that 89.1% of the 6,264 offenders were 18 years of age or older.
The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer reports there were 161 anti-Asian hate crimes in 2019, and there were 279 cases of anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020.
The website also revealed that hate crimes against Black or African Americans rose about 46%, with 1,972 hate crimes in 2019 and 2,871 hate crimes in 2020 targeting Black or African Americans.

Earlier this year, a Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism report compiling data from police departments from the 16 most populous U.S. cities found a 150% increase in anti-Asian attacks from 2019. New York City, which saw the highest rise among those cities, had a nearly ten-fold increase from 28 incidents compared to three the year before.

Featured Image via @DennisKPIX (left), CeFaan Kim (right)

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