Hate Crime Reporting Uneven - washingtonpost.com: ...In 'Hate Crimes Reported by Victims and Police,' an article based on the National Criminal Victimization Survey and Uniform Crime Reporting, statistician Caroline Wolf Harlow said the nation had an annual average of 210,000 hate crimes between July 2000 and December 2003. About 92,000 crimes were reported to police, Harlow wrote.
An ordinary crime becomes a hate crime when a perpetrator chooses a victim because of a particular characteristic, Harlow wrote. It can be skin color, sexual orientation, physical disability or religion. And there must be evidence that hate prompted the crime. According to the FBI's latest report, most people who commit hate crimes are white -- about 59 percent. Twenty percent are black.
In incidents involving racial bias alone, blacks represented 66 percent of the victims, the report said. Jews were more often the victims of religious violence, at 65 percent. Hispanics were more likely to be the targets of ethnic crimes, at 63 percent, and gay men, at 62 percent, were the most common victims of attacks related to sexual orientation.
