Since its peak in the mid-90s, violent crime is down 40%. Anti-Black hate crime is down 50%:
Anti-Black hate crime has trended downward over the past 25 years but began to turn back upward after Ferguson. It spiked during the George Floyd protests before dropping the following year, and is currently up by a third since 2014.
And who was elected President in 2016?
Coincidence or not, you be the judge.
Crimes reported are not the same as crimes that occurred.
And "hate" "crimes" that are reported are not necessarily hate crimes that happened....
This can be of the Jussie Smollet variety (seems like nowadays half the country wants that sweet sweet juice of victimhood and the sympathy it engenders);
or it can be of the Matthew Shepard variety (insistence on hate crime motivations even as ever more evidence mounts that traditional crime motivations drove the episode).
Hell we saw this just recently in the 2023 Half Moon Bay, and then 2023 Monterey Park shootings where our fine mainstream media leaped at the chance to claim these were racially motivated until, unfortunately, it soon came out that the first shooter was one shooter was named Chunli Zhao, and the second was named Huu Can Tran.
"Traditional crime motivations" in the Shepard case? The killers' defense was based on gay panic.
Someone hasn't bothered to follow the updates on this since the trial occurred...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard#Subsequent_reporting
It's nice that hate crimes against blacks generally have gone down each year. That doesn't mean the outrage and pain reset at the end of each year.
A more useful graph might be the amount of anti black rhetoric and activities, especially the out in the open way too accepted by way too many people kind. There will always be people who hate other people because of race, no matter how much progress we make. But I suspect the hate that had been pushed to the fringes is openly embraced by more people than it has been in a long time. It's partly a social media thing. Haters may have been encouraged by outlets like Fox News, but they come out of hiding when they find "their people" online.
With the mention of George Floyd, Drum seems to be implying that protests engender the hate crimes, but it is also possible to see what happened to Floyd as a manifestation of anti-black hate, with the protests as a natural reaction to the increase in such hate. Otherwise you are in the position of claiming that the hate is a reaction to the protests, which is an unfair thing to be saying. To support such an argument, Drum could see whether there is a spike in hate crimes following the protests of the 60s, for example. And if so, perhaps he ought to acknowledge that hate crimes are a retaliation for the assertion of civil rights by black people, which is what protests are.
Perhaps hate crimes are caused by lead.
Heh. They certainly seem to involve lead.
The latest FBI statistics show that 56.1% of alleged hate crime offenders were white (smaller than their representation in the population), and that 21.3% were black (higher than their representation.
When giving such numbers, always give a reference .
This is the reference: https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crime-statistics
It would be interesting to know if the types of hate crimes have changed over the last 30 years. I don't remember there being many mass shooting hate crimes in the 90s.
It doesn't work to simply report the raw numbers, because the FBI data is based on reports from local law enforcement agencies, and the number of reporting agencies varies from year to year. Eg, the 2020 data is based on reports from"15,136 of 18,623 law enforcement agencies around the country." The 2021 data was based on reports from 11,883 agencies. (There was a change in data collection procedures for 2021, hence the decrease).
Sources:
https://www.justice.gov/crs/highlights/2020-hate-crimes-statistics
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime
I wonder about the "peak". There were some hate crimes before then. Of course, as with the earthquakes there's measurement problems, both in the sense that reporting is better, and I'd guess that the standard for what constitutes a hate crime has changed since the 1950s and 60's.
If we leave out the horrors of slavery, then it is likely that the actual peak in anti-Black hate crimes happened in the late 1860's, when Reconstruction was forcibly dismantled by the KKK, or the 1910's, with the wave of anti-Black terrorism that motivated the Great Migration.