By NAN Staff Writer
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Weds. Nov. 13, 2018: Should Caribbean immigrants and Caribbean Americans in the United States, many of whom are black, be more worried, in light of the latest FBI Hate Crimes report?
The agency on Tuesday said White hate crimes across the USA is growing steadily, with more whites committing racial attacks in 2017 than any other race group.
In 2017, over 3,227 of the hate crime offenders were White, with the most, or 1,084 charged with intimidation. Another 840 were charged with simple assault while 530 were charged with aggravated assault and 571 with crimes against property including destruction, damage and vandalism.
Another disturbing trend in the report showed that blacks and Jews, more than any other group, were increasingly the victims of biased attacks. Some 2,358 of all racially motivated incidents reported were against blacks or African-Americans while 976 were against Jews. Since Caribbean immigrants are not singled out as a bloc, it is unclear how many of the black victims of hate crime are Caribbean immigrants.
The number of hate crimes reported in the United States jumped by 17 percent last year, the largest increase since 2001 when the terrorist hijackings on 9/11 fueled a surge in attacks on Americans of Muslim and Arab ancestry.
U.S. law enforcement agencies reported a total of 7,175 hate crimes in 2017, up from 6,121 in 2016 and the third consecutive annual increase. Race and religion remained the two biggest drivers of hate crimes in 2017 with 3,272 victims attacked because of race.
Only 525 Hispanic victims were reported and 128 Arabs but 314 attacks against Muslims were reported.
The 17 percent increase trails only a 34 percent increase in hate crimes from 1994 to 1995 and a 20.7 percent increase from 2000 to 2001. Most of the crimes committed were in Pennsylvania, Texas and Illinois at the victims home or on a highway, road/alley, street or sidewalk.
In a statement, Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker called the report “a call to action” and vowed that “we will heed that call.”
But Sikh Coalition Legal Director, Amrith Kaur, said the “numbers still fail to paint a complete picture of the enormity of the problem.”
All 49 states that report hate crimes – Hawaii does not participate in the data gathering – had jurisdictions not reporting any hate crimes in 2017. More than 300 jurisdictions representing populations of at least 50,000 people reported zero hate crimes in 2017.
The FBI defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.”
The report comes as many blame the President of the United States for fueling hate in his racial and xenophobic rhetoric and his recent claim that he is a “nationalist.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, the premier U.S. organization monitoring the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists, say there are more than 1,600 extremist groups operating across the country.
Brian Levin, Director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and a professor of criminal justice at California State University, San Bernardino, said a lack of national leadership on the issue of hate crimes appears to be a factor in the increase.
