In a country where hate crimes are on the rise, partly due to the xenophobic rhetoric of racist-in-chief Donald Trump, it appears that we have no idea how extensive and widespread hate crimes really are. This is because the federal government is incredibly negligent in keeping accurate records. Despite a legal mandate to do so, it appears that more than 100 federal law enforcement agencies regularly fail to submit statistics on hate crimes to the national hate crimes database run by the FBI.
The FBI has identified at least 120 federal agencies that aren’t uploading information to the database, according to Amy Blasher, a unit chief at the CJIS division, an arm of the bureau that is overseeing the modernization of its information systems.
The federal government operates a vast array of law enforcement agencies—ranging from Customs and Border Protection to the Drug Enforcement Administration to the Amtrak Police—employing more than 120,000 law enforcement officers with arrest powers. The FBI would not say which agencies have declined to participate in the program, but the bureau’s annual tally of hate crimes statistics does not include any offenses handled by federal law enforcement. Indeed, the problem is so widespread that the FBI itself isn’t submitting the hate crimes it investigates to its own database.
“We truly don’t understand what’s happening with crime in the US without the federal component,” Blasher said in an interview.
The FBI itself isn’t even in compliance with the law. How much more absurd can this get? Clearly, it’s not a priority for our government to prioritize who is being impacted by hate crimes. So much for keeping citizens safe. Likewise, agencies don’t feel a need to press state and local police departments (the majority of the organizations supplying the information) to submit these statistics. And why bother? There doesn’t seem to be any accountability for them violating the law, anyway.
A federal law, the 1988 Uniform Federal Crime Reporting Act, requires all US government law enforcement agencies to send a wide variety of crime data to the FBI. Two years later, after the passage of another law, the bureau began collecting data about “crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.” That was later expanded to include gender and gender identity. [...]
At present, the bulk of the information in the database is supplied by state and local police departments. In 2015, the database tracked more than 5,580 alleged hate crime incidents, including 257 targeting Muslims, an upward surge of 67 percent from the previous year. (The bureau hasn’t released 2016 or 2017 statistics yet.)
Of course, no one seems to have any idea when and how long it will take to bring agencies into full compliance with their requirement to report crimes under the law. And this doesn’t just concern hate crimes, it appears that federal agencies are failing to report all manner of crimes. “But hate crimes, and the lack of reliable data concerning them, have been of intense interest amid the country’s highly polarized and volatile political environment.” Rest assured, we can be positive that the Trump administration will not make this a priority. If anything, the crimes incited by their hateful rhetoric and policies stand to benefit from these agencies not doing their jobs.