Hate crimes against Muslims rose 67% last year, FBI says
Hate crimes targeting Muslims rose from 154 incidents in 2014 to 257 in 2015, an increase of 67 percent, according to FBI statistics released on Monday. The FBI also recorded 37 anti-Arab hate crimes, a category that wasn’t tracked in 2014.
Overall, hate crimes rose by 7 percent last year, report the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. A press release is here.
The last time there were more hate crimes against Muslims was in 2001 after the terrorist attacks. “The statistics come,” USA Today reports, “as civil rights groups have been monitoring a spasm of religious and racially charged incidents following the election of Republican Donald Trump as president.”
The FBI reported 5,850 hate crime incidents last year, compared to 5,479 incidents in the prior year. The figures include 32 multiple-bias incidents and 5,818 single-bias incidents. Among the single-bias incidents, 56.9 percent were motivated by a race/ethnicity/ancestry bias; 21.4 percent were prompted by religious bias; and 18.1 percent resulted from sexual-orientation bias, according to this FBI information.
Among the religious-bias incidents, 51.3 percent were anti-Jewish and 22.2 percent were anti-Islamic. Among the race/ethnicity/ancestry bias, 52.7 percent were motivated by anti-black bias.
The FBI announced in September that overall violent crime increase 3.9 percent in 2015.
