Itongadol.- The Anti-Defamation League has called into question the validity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s newly released national hate crime statistics on Monday, calling them incomplete. According to the FBI’s 2012 national Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA), an annual publication drawing on law enforcement records from across the United States, 5,796 hate crimes were committed in 2012, a seven percent decline over 2011.
These figures, the lowest rate since the program’s inception in 1991, according to the ADL, do not take into account hate crimes committed within the jurisdictions of a quarter of American law enforcement agencies.
Reporting such statistics to the FBI is purely voluntary and “only 13,022 law enforcement agencies out of approximately 18,000 provided data to the FBI in 2012,” the ADL stated. 1,478 additional agencies contributed records in 2011.
Expressing his organization’s “profound disappointment” in the agencies which declined to participate in the hate crime study, ADL National Chair Abraham Foxman called the FBI report a “significant setback in the progress that has been made over the past decade.”
“Especially disappointing is the fact that the report contains no data from jurisdictions that had been models for national response in the past,” he said. “The Justice Department and the FBI should use every resource at their disposal to push harder to obtain this missing data, urging those cities and states that still have not provided their 2012 hate crime data to do so as quickly as possible.”
The ADL stated that it is working with partners to “reboot the HCSA collecting and reporting program” and is urging retraining for law enforcement in order to ensure more comprehensive reporting of hate crimes statistics in the future.