New York – Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released statistics on hate crimes across the nation. The data contains information on 7,722 hate crimes submitted by local law enforcement agencies across the nation.
The report included information on 1,195 incidents in which the perpetrators’ motivating factor was thevictims’ actual or perceived sexual orientation an 18% increase in such incidents from the FBI's 2005 report.
The proportion of all hate crimes of all types that were motivated by actual or perceived sexual orientation was 15%, up only a small margin from the 14% of incidents that were so motivated by sexual orientation in 2005.
As in years past, the FBI statistics on anti-lesbian, gay and bisexual incidents (the FBI does not collect statistics on anti-transgender violence) continue to fall far short of the number of incidents tracked in the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs’ (NCAVP) own annual report on hate violence, which recorded 1,393 incidents in only twelve regions across the nation – more than half of which involved criminal offenses.
Clarence Patton, Executive Director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, an NCAVP member organization stated, "It appears that some improvement has been made in some areas of law enforcement collection of hate crime data and reporting that data to the FBI; however, we are concerned, particularly when looking at the dramatic increase in the number of anti-lesbian, gay and bisexual incidents reported - though the overall number of reports captured by the FBI rose only 8%, the number of reports impacting our communities rose at more than twice that rate."
"We are also continually disappointed in the overall lack of real data on hate violence and hate crimes," continued Patton. "Obviously, NCAVP and its members have far fewer resources than the federal government, but year after year we consistently report more, and more detailed information on hate crimes against LGBT people. It is essential that all of us - community advocates, service providers, and law enforcement - work together to address this issue; we can start by requiring that all law enforcement agencies submit data on hate crimes. None of us even have a solid picture of the scope of the problem, but we can all agree that it's much worse than what's borne out in either our statistics or certainly the FBI's data," added Patton.
The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs addresses the pervasive problem of violence committed against and within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and HIV-positive communities. NCAVP is a coalition of programs that document and advocate for victims of anti-LGBT and anti-HIV/AIDS violence/harassment, domestic violence, sexual assault, police misconduct and other forms of victimization.
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