It has been over ten years since hate crimes (hate crimes), that is to say motivated by prejudices related to the ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or even the gender of the victims, had not reached such a level in the United States.
In its annual report, released Monday, November 16, the US Federal Police (FBI) identified 7,314 in 2019 – the largest number recorded since 2008 (7,783 incidents). And, for the third year in a row, the number of hate crimes across the Atlantic has exceeded 7,100. These data include both violent attacks and non-violent incidents – such as acts of vandalism, for example.
Among these hate crimes, the FBI reported 51 homicides in 2019, more than double those reported in its previous report (24) and the highest level ever since the publication of such data began in 1991. In question: the massacre perpetrated in August in the parking lot of a Walmart hypermarket in El Paso (Texas), during which 22 people were killed and several dozen were injured. The terrorist, a 21-year-old far-right sympathizer, then justified his act by a desire to slow down the“Hispanic invasion” in this southern state of the country.
According to the main elements of the report:
- crimes motivated by racist prejudice concern 57.6% of reported incidents. The number of cases targeting the black and African-American population decreased slightly in 2019: 1,930, against 1,943 in 2018. But the latter nonetheless remains the first victim of these acts (48.5%). Anti-Hispanic crimes are on the rise from 485 in 2018 to 527 in 2019;
- crimes motivated by prejudice against religion concern 20.1% of reported incidents. Jews are the first victims (60.2% of offenses), followed by Muslims (13.2% of offenses);
- Crimes targeting LGBT + people increased in 2019, notably with an 18% increase in acts against the transgender community – the largest since the FBI began collecting this specific data in 2013.
In addition, details the report, the perpetrators of hate crimes identified over the past year are most often white (52.5% of cases).
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The extent of the phenomenon “largely” underestimated
However, “FBI Annual Report vastly underestimates true level of hate crimes [commis] in the country “, says the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an association that monitors the evolution of hate groups in the United States.
A dimension which is due – in part – to the fact that victims do not necessarily report this type of incident. The SPLC noted in particular the lack of trust between the police and the communities concerned, but also the lack of training in the management of such cases. In a June 2017 report, the Ministry of Justice estimated that an average of 250,000 hate crimes are committed each year across the Atlantic.
But the biggest limitation to FBI data is that various law enforcement agencies, local and statewide, are not required to release information to the federal organization.
Hate Crime Statistics Act (Hate Crime Statistics Act), passed in 1990, provided that the federal authorities draw up this inventory of the elements collected and transmitted by more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies.
Gold, tip The Washington Post, the year 2019 was marked by a drop in the number of structures participating in this collection and census effort: from 16,039 in 2018, they were only 15,558. And only 2,172 of them – less than 14% – reported one or more hate crimes.
In other words, everyone else either said they hadn’t recorded any such offense last year or didn’t provide any data. “Including more than 80 towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants”, wonders the Southern Poverty Law Center.
For his part, The New York Times highlights some notable omissions in previous counts, such as the death of an anti-racist protester crushed by a neo-Nazi during a far-right protest in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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The rise of white supremacism
Recent FBI data also shows that hate crimes reported to federal authorities have increased during Donald Trump’s presidency. Between 2016 and 2017, a peak of 17% of reported incidents was observed. During 2018, their number had decreased very slightly, before a further increase last year.
For the Southern Poverty Law Center, this trend is directly linked to the growth of the movement advocating white supremacism or nationalism, whose number of groups increased by 55% between 2017 and 2019. During his tenure in the White House, Donald Trump has always been reluctant to condemn this ideology.
And the association warns against the strategy of “accelerators”, in vogue in this movement:
“For a growing segment of the white nationalist movement, violence is not just a means of inflicting damage on groups they deem inferior, but a strategy to alert other whites to the perceived dangers of immigration , racial integration and decline of whites as a percentage of the American population. “
Additional data from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the University of California also highlights that the number of homicides perpetrated by supporters of this cause increased in 2019, for the third consecutive year. .
The Department of Homeland Security warned in October of the threats posed by violence linked to white supremacism. In a report, he estimated that 2019 had been “The deadliest year” in terms of extremism on American soil since the Oklahoma City attack in 1995. At the time, Timothy McVeigh, a survivalist opposed to gun control and close to the militia movement (right-wing anarchist), detonated a car bomb outside a federal building in the center of town, killing 168 people and injuring more than 680 others.
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A context of heightened tensions in 2020
The FBI hate crime report echoes the current situation in the United States, as 2020 saw a wave of denunciations and anger at discrimination in the country.
The presidential campaign was thus largely marked by a resurgence of the racial question, in particular from the angle of police violence, after the death, at the end of May, of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American, during a brutal arrest. in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This tragedy gave rise to clashes between protesters of the Black Lives Matter movement and white supremacists.
The Covid-19 pandemic was also accompanied by‘a wave of discrimination, even violence, against people of Asian origin; prejudices reinforced by the words of 45e president of the country against “Chinese virus”. As early as April, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, had expressed his concern at the risk of “Hate crimes committed by individuals and groups targeting minority populations in the United States whom they believe are responsible for the spread of the virus”.
During the last presidential debate, at the end of October, the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, estimated that Donald Trump was putting “Oil on every racist fire”, recalling that the Republican had entered the campaign in 2016 by targeting “Mexican rapists” and that he had, barely installed in the White House, set up the “Muslim ban”, entry restrictions on American territory for nationals of several predominantly Muslim countries. The outgoing president had also largely fueled the controversy over Barack Obama’s birth certificate since 2007.
