The United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics for 2024 shows 11,679 hate crime incidents in 2024, compared to 11,862 in 2023 – welcome news after fears of a sustained surge in hate crimes driven by the atrocities in Palestine and Israel.
The table below, extracted from the FBI Crime Data Explorer, shows the five-year trend of hate crimes against the four communities that I’ve been covering in my annual analysis published in Scroll since 2021.
As I have cautioned before, the absolute numbers in of themselves may suffer underreporting and other flaws, but the numbers are very helpful in studying trends and comparing the vulnerability of different communities.
There was a significant spike in hate crimes against Jews and Muslims in October-November 2023, presumably driven by the Hamas attack on Israel. However, the numbers came down rapidly in subsequent months, despite the genocide in Gaza.
However, anti-Jewish hate crimes have not come down to the pre-October 23 levels. Hate crimes against Sikhs and Hindus seem unaffected by the Gaza situation.
The surprising take-away for me is that every community that I’ve been writing about showed only a marginal increase/decrease in annual hate crimes against them: anti-Jewish, up from 2,001 to 2,082; anti-Islamic, down from 283 to 26; anti-Sikh, down from 163 to 143; and anti-Hindu, down from 32 to 26 (Row 7).
That said, the sharp upward trajectory of hate crimes from 2020 to 2024 should be of great concern to every American: anti-Jewish hate crimes shot up by 262%; anti-Islamic hate crimes by 207% and anti-Sikh hate crimes by 154%.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
