FBI Updates Hate Crime List, Almost 500 Antisemitic Incidents Added

By Matis Glenn

In an update to national hate crimes statistics for 2021, the FBI released data on Monday showing almost three times the amount of antisemitic incidents originally reported, which made Jewish people the most targeted religious group in the country, according to Jewish Insider.

The FBI in its initial report failed to count incidents in cities with large Jewish populations, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and almost the entire state of Florida. The new count of incidents, 817, shows a 20% increase from 2020, and places Jews as the 4th most targeted group overall, when taking into account race, gender, nationality, and lifestyles.

Hate crimes in general increased by 11.6%, according to the data.

The majority of antisemitic incidents were vandalism and destruction of property, which accounted for 60.9% of reports. Just over 30% involved intimidation or verbal abuse, and 12.8% were physical assaults.

The FBI said that the missing data was due to the agency’s phasing out of its previous reporting system, the Summary Reporting System. When it changed over to the current National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) over the past six years, some localities were behind in implementation and failed to upgrade their reporting systems before the 2021 deadline.

Rep. Kathy Manning (D-NC), a co-chair of the task force who organized a briefing with FBI officials, said that the first report was “woefully incomplete” and that it gave a false impression that hate crimes had declined.

“The mistaken conclusion reached in the original report is evidence that the lack of timely data submissions and slow compliance with the new data reporting system risks a faulty analysis by the FBI and handicaps our ability to address the rise in hate crimes and antisemitism,” Manning said in a statement. “There is a clear need for more robust compliance with collection and reporting from all state and local law enforcement agencies to the FBI in a timely manner.”