FBI Releases Supplemental 2021 Hate Crime Statistics Showing 11.6 Percent Increase Nationwide

Today, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program released a 2021 hate crime statistics supplement about bias-motivated incidents throughout the nation. For the 2021 data year, the UCR Program accepted Summary Reporting System (SRS) hate crime data submissions and additional National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) hate crime reports from 3,025 agencies that covered a combined population of 87,239,467 to help compile this special report. The supplemental data was combined with that submitted via NIBRS, which has been converted to the SRS format. This supplement allows for a more complete representation of reported hate crimes in the US for 2021. Nationally, reported hate crime incidents increased 11.6% from 8,120 in 2020 to 9,065 in 2021.

The updated dataset for 2021 includes all law enforcement agency hate crime incident reporting regardless of the number of months or quarters. While the NIBRS 2021 hate crime dataset reported 7,262 incidents and 8,673 related offenses as being motivated by bias toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity, the supplemental hate crime dataset reports involve 10,840 incidents and 12,411 related offenses. The supplemental reporting figure is higher as it represents a larger population as more agencies were able to submit via the SRS system. (Due to rounding, percentage breakdowns may not add up to 100 percent.)

Victims of Hate Crime Incidents 

• Over 10,500 single-bias incidents involved 12,411 victims.
  • A percent distribution of victims by bias type shows that
  • 64.5% of victims were targeted because of the offenders’ race/ethnicity/ancestry bias,
  • 15.9% were targeted because of the offenders’ sexual-orientation bias,
  • 14.1% were targeted because of the offenders’ religious bias,
  • 3.2% were targeted because of the offenders’ gender identity bias,
  • 1.4% were targeted because of the offenders’ disability bias, and
  • 1.0% were targeted because of the offenders’ gender bias.
• There were 310 multiple-bias hate crime incidents that involved 411 victims.

Offenses by Crime Category 

• Of the 8,327 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against persons in the updated 2021 dataset,
  • 43.2% were intimidation,
  • 35.5% were simple assault, and
  • 20.1% were aggravated assault.
  • 19 rapes and 18 murders were reported as hate crimes.
  • The remaining 70 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against persons were reported in the category of other.
• Of the 3,817 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against property, 71.2% were acts of destruction/damage/vandalism.
• 267 additional offenses were classified as crimes against society. This crime category represents society’s prohibition against engaging in certain types of activity such as gambling, prostitution, and drug violations. These are typically victimless crimes in which property is not the object.

The 2021 supplemental release demonstrates the FBI’s commitment to provide meaningful data sets to the American public to reflect a national picture of the hate crime trend.

Hate Crime Statistics, 2021, is available as a downloadable on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer at cde.ucr.cjis.gov.

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