Photo: FBI Report: In 2010, Nearly 70% of Hate Crimes Based on Ethnicity Were Against Hispanics
According to this year’s edition of the FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics report, nearly 67 percent of victims of ethnicity-based hate crimes in 2010 were Hispanic.
Of the 1,122 hate crime victims reported to the FBI in 2010, 747 of them (66.6 percent) were Hispanic. The remaining victims were split between all other ethnicities. In 2009, only 45 percent of the ethnic-bias hate crimes were against Hispanic victims.
While the majority of ethnic-bias hate crimes were against Hispanics, overall the most victimized groups in 2010 were African-Americans and those of the Jewish faith.
Though the reason for the increase in anti-Latino hate crimes is not definitively known, the release of the FBI report comes at a time when anti-illegal immigration legislation is spreading to a number of states.
“Almost a fourth of our 2010 civil rights caseload involved crimes motivated by a particular bias against the victim,” said Eric Thomas, our civil rights chief in Washington, D.C., “and we frequently worked these cases with state and local law enforcement to ensure that justice was done—whether at the state level or at the federal level.”
