Hate Crimes in America have Surged in the Last Two Years. Here's What you Should Know About this Epidemic.
Hate crimes are not a new phenomenon in America. Even before we gained independence from Great Britain in 1776, colonization and slavery fostered the onslaught of systemic racism that America still prevails hundreds of years later.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know the exact number of hate crimes that have occurred in the United States. In 1990, a federal law called the Hate Crime Statistics Act required the Justice Department and the FBI to publish an annual report on hate crimes.
However, the statistics published in these annual reports are likely a major undercount because in some jurisdictions, local prosecutors are the ones that define what a hate crime is or isn’t. Therefore, the government does not collect these statistics from these jurisdictions. According to CNN, out of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, 3,000 of them did not submit crime statistics to the FBI in 2020.
The Department of Justice lists two definitions for hate crimes, one for federal hate crimes and one for state hate crimes:
At a federal level, hate crime laws include crimes committed on the basis of the victim’s perceived or actual race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability.
Most state hate crime laws include crimes committed on the basis of race, color, and religion; many also include crimes committed on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and disability.
Since 2020, hate crimes all over the country have risen, with the sharpest surges occurring in major cities. In a report published by Axios, who referenced data collected by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism that focused on 14 “major metropolitan areas,” hate crimes surged 46% between 2020 and 2021.
Though the report maintains that Black Americans remain the most targeted group in most cities, anti-Asian American hate crimes increased by 339% in 2021. Though Asian-Americans have always been subject to racism, the group Stop AAPI Hate, which tracks targeted incidents against the Asian American Pacific Islander community, maintains that misinformation and hateful rhetoric about COVID-19 has led to the sharp increase. The co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, Cynthia Choi, told Axios that America is in crisis mode when it comes to hate crimes:
“The fact that we have members of our community who are afraid to leave their homes, to go to work, to take public transportation to go to the grocery store, to basically live our daily lives is heartbreaking," she said.
In New York City, plenty of despicable hate crimes against the AAPI community during the pandemic have been documented, including the recent tragic murder of Michelle Alyssa Go who was pushed in front of the train tracks before an oncoming train. However, so far in 2022, the largest spike in hate crimes is targeted towards the Jewish community. According to the monthly hate crime statistics released by the NYPD, hate crimes against Jews surged 275% in January 2022 compared to January 2021.
There is a lot of fear-mongering about the rising crime rate in America. It’s imperative to specify that the largest spike is due to hate crimes. While those of us who don’t hold political offices in America may feel powerless in combatting these acts of injustice—we are not. Spreading awareness on social media, at rallies, and even to individual family members and friends is a start.
