I don't quite remember what piqued my interest in this, but I got curious about the trend in hate crimes against Black people. According to the FBI, here are the numbers, represented as the rate per million of the Black population:
A number of people, including me, have posited that the Obama era produced a white backlash that eventually elected Donald Trump president. There's some evidence to support this, but it sure doesn't show up in the hate crime statistics. Hate crimes against Black people plummeted by nearly half during Obama's term and have pretty much stayed there ever since.¹ This is despite the fact that presumably the Obama administration put a greater focus on hate crimes than either George Bush or Donald Trump.
Violent assaults on Black people have gone down by nearly half since 2005, far more than violent assaults in general. In this case, however, the decline has been fairly steady over the entire period.
The FBI is not the only authority on hate crimes and the NCVS is not the only authority on victimization. Still, they're generally well respected and use the same methodology from year to year. This probably represents reality pretty well.
I have been accused—rightfully—of constantly telling you that things are better than you think. The reason is simple: Whenever I look into something, it very often turns out to be better than the media focus would have us believe. It wasn't my intention to find yet another example when I dug up these numbers, but I'm not really surprised any longer when that's the way it turns out.
POSTSCRIPT: Standard caveat that there are some things that really are as bad as we think—life expectancy, opioid addiction, income inequality, etc.—and that just because something is declining doesn't mean we don't still have a lot of work left to get it even lower.
¹However, despite the decline it's still the case that the rate of anti-Black hate crime is considerably higher than the rate against any other ethnicity.
The suits say: If it isn't the end of the world, people will not hang around to watch your ads.
The beat reporter says: if I'm going to get my story on the air, it has to seem bigger than those of my colleagues.
The scientist says: not a damn one of these guys has a ghost of a clue how to look at data.
"If it bleeds, it leads".
Except when we're talking about the presidency.
I don't think that's all of it.
It's the same reason the christians go on about "The War on Christmas", supposed persecutions in China, and martyrdoms 2000 years ago. Same reason the gays love documentaries about the 60s (pre-stonewall) and 80s (AIDS). Same reason wokists love movies about the 60s.
Everyone wants to be a martyr. Everyone wants that frisson of "I'm better than all those other people, *I* am a truly good, better than good and way better than average, person even if the world doesn't yet recognize it."
Both David Sedaris and Gary Shteyngart are superior writers in part because they are so willing to admit this tendency in themselves and to mock it mercilessly.
Considering Donald Trump did the best with black voters since 1980, I would say that illusion was silly and dumb. Elections are marketing looking for the low information voter. Obama Clinton, Bush and Reagan say high. Trump is the only President to lose a election yet won that important voting segment. Amazing really.
Incumbency effect.
He won what?
Trump improved his numbers among black voters compared to his low of 6% in 2016 but as a whole he still only won 12%, which is just a single point better than what Bush did in 2004, but exactly the same Dole did in 1996, who also lost the election. Outside of McCain (4%)and Romney (6%) who went up against Obama, 9-11% has been the typical voter support for Republican candidates since Reagan got 14% back in 1980.
Midgaard trying to gaslight us that the movement of the working class to the GOP extends to Black voters.
I suppose he needs to up his ludicrous game given Taibbi was just on his RollingStone-dot-com pod saying that QANON is rooted in something true.
Don’t you have to correct for overall crime rate, which as you’ve often shown also drops over this period? Hard to say it has anything to do with race relations if it’s just part of the wider trend.
i was thinking the same thing, BUT even if lower anti-black hate crimes or violent crime attacks simply tracked with general decrease in crime, that still would cut against the conventional wisdom of constantly worse racial animus and violence against POC driven by either obama backlash or trump incitement.
"A number of people, including me, have posited that the Obama era produced a white backlash that eventually elected Donald Trump president."
The Obama era smoked out the bigots. The Trump era made them comfortable with their inner bigotry.
And just because they're being openly bigoted, that doesn't mean they're committing hate crimes.
"These men are cowards, Donnie".
Your second graph is not all that useful. If I don't misremember violent crimes against Blacks are often committed by Black offenders. The category "crimes against Black people" is there to measure the degree of victimization regardless of motive (it would be interesting though to know he cause of that spike during the Obama era).
As to the hate crime statistics: There are many borderline cases where a decision (hate crime of just crime?) is made by prosecutors. I think it is fair to assume that the culture changed during the Trump era and that the definition of "hate crime" was a bit more stringent than during Bush/Obama. If the President does not want to prosecute hate crimes there will be fewer that are prosecuted.
The other thing is this: only a small minority of racists commit prosecutable hate crimes. Most of them stay verbal. As a measure of racism in society hate crimes alone don't suffice. This data certainly does not disprove the notion that racism was a main driver of the Trump vote.
BTW it would be interesting to see the statistics for anti-semitic hate crimes. My feeling is that they have gone up recently
How did you derive your data in the first chart?
UCR shows the total number of incidents, offenses, and victims; it doesn't include rate per million. Victims includes individuals and businesses, which probably is the best measure. For 2019, it shows 2391 victims.
US Census estimated population for 2019 is 328,239,523. Of that, 13.4% were African-American/Black alone, which is 43,984,096. Therefore:
2391/43.98 = 54 victims per 1M African-Americans.
Also, might you look at certain other race/religion hate crimes? I plotted that of African-American, Asian, Hispanic, Arab (only goes to 2015) and Jewish. 2014 seems to be the lowest point of reported hate crimes in all of these groups, followed by a (modest) rising trend.
There's a link right there to the source.
The FBI statistics that Kevin links to only report the raw numbers (ie number of crimes), they are not reported as a rate of population, that is Kevin's own estimate.
What D_ohrk_E1 says is correct. Also worth pointing out that in the smoothed out curve Kevin presents, the increment since the low point of 2014 doesn't look like much, but in actual number of crimes, there has been an increase by 20% during the Trump years, which I'd say is a big deal especially when one considers Trump's DOJ reluctance to classify hate crimes, so odds are that a lot of offenses were not included.
The link to annual UCR reports. In them, the only relevant data, aggregate, is table 1. That data is total incidents, offenses, and victims.
Where?
FBI reports total offenses, % that are racially motivated, and % of those that are anti-Black. Figures for Black population are easily gotten. The rest is just arithmetic.
Occam's Razor says this is an artifact of reporting.
not sure plummeted is the word, but the broad observation is well taken
DKos linked this exact same source and described as hate crimes being at their highest level in a decade.
Hi Kevin. Could you do the same research but focusing on anti-Semitic crimes?