[AinderS]

The rise could be due to the bar for "hate crime" being so low that leaving tire marks on graffiti on a public road qualifies [1] (and an even lower standard is used in Canada [2]). Regardless, two things are lacking in the article.

One is the population covered by the police departments submitting the data [3]. Without normalizing for that, we have no idea if hate crimes increased, or if we are simply counting hate crimes among a larger population. The article heavily implies that the rise would be even worse if the "thousands of agencies" that did not submit data in 2020 had submitted it. But it doesn't actually tell us whether more or fewer agencies submitted data in 2020 than in 2019, 18, 17... The honest thing to do would have been to give us normalized values to begin with.

The second issue is that, despite how granular the statistics are for the victims, not one word is spent on the perpetrators. I wonder why... [4]

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/santa-cruz-police-...

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/hate-messages-univer...

[3] Law enforcement submit this data to the FBI of their own volition, and in 2020, thousands of agencies did not submit their crime statistics.

[4] https://www.newsweek.com/hate-crimes-documented-police-dispr...