FBI Releases 2015 Hate Crime Statistics

Yesterday, the FBI released its annual report on hate crimes. Statistics for 2015 are available here.

The report tallies a total of 5,818 hate crimes in 2015, an increase of almost 7 percent from 2014. Roughly 60 percent of reported crimes are attributed to what the Bureau refers to as "race/ethnicity/ancestry bias," roughly 20 percent are attributed to "religious bias," and about 18 percent targeted victims on the basis of sexual orientation. Half of attacks based on race were committed against Black victims, while among religiously motivated attacks, slightly more than half targeted Jewish victims and 22 percent targeted Muslims.

Notably, attacks against Muslims jumped almost 67 percent, from 154 recorded incidents in 2014 to 257 incidents in 2015. As the New York Times notes, this marks 2015 as the year with the highest number of anti-Muslim hate crimes since 2001. While attacks increased to some extent against other groups as well (for example, anti-Semitic hate crimes rose by 9 percent from 2014 to 2015), Islamophobic attacks saw by far the sharpest rise. The next-highest increase occurred in attacks against transgender and gender-nonconforming people, which increased by roughly 16 percent.