Author Description

This report presents data on the characteristics of hate crimes and hate crime victims using both the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR) as sources. Results show that an annual average of 195,000 hate crime victimizations occurred during 2003-2009, but that the rate declined toward the end of that same period. Also included are details on characteristics of victims, motivations for hate crimes, and locations of incidents along with other data. Further highlights indicate that from 2003 to 2009, the rate of violent hate crime victimizations in the United States decreased from 0.8 per 1,000 persons age 12 or older to 0.5 per 1,000; from 2003 to 2009, hate crime victimizations accounted for less than 1 percent of the total victimizations captured by the NCVS; in nearly 90 percent of the hate crime victimizations occurring between 2003 and 2009, the victim suspected the offender was motivated by racial or ethnic prejudice or both; more than 4 in 5 hate crime victimizations involved violence; police were notified of fewer than half (45 percent) of all hate crime victimizations; the majority of violent hate crimes were inter-racial while the majority of non-hate violent crimes were intra-racial; and in about 37 percent of violent hate crimes the offender knew the victim while in violent non-hate crimes, half of all victims knew the offender.