But you wouldn’t know it from news stories like THIS that appear on the same day:
Just like the concept of hate crime itself, in which the thoughts inside a perpetrator’s head make a physical crime more or less severe, hate crime statistics seem mired in confusion.
Hate crimes in the United States fell in 2018, but violent hate crimes increased, according to new statistics released Tuesday by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program Tuesday.
According to the very same report, hate crimes in the state of Texas more than doubled from 2017 To 2018.
More than 16,000 law enforcement agencies around the country reported 7,120 criminal incidents and 8,496 related offenses connected to race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender and gender identity in 2018.
The criminal hate crime incidents were slightly down from the 7,175 reported in 2017. Violent hate crimes — which includes killings, rapes, aggravated assaults and robberies — totaled 1,204, up from 1,183 the year before.
Hate crime homicides reached a 27-year high of 24, mostly from the 11 who were killed in the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh.
Crimes against transgender or gender non-conforming people increased significantly in 2018. The FBI reported 157 incidents motivated by anti-transgender bias and 27 motivated by bias against gender non-conforming people, a jump from 118 for anti-transgender and 13 for gender non-conforming the year before.
