70% of Ethnicity Hate Crimes Are Against Hispanics

By Deniz Sonmez-Alpan

Nearly 70% of victims of ethnicity-based hate crimes in 2010 were Hispanic, according to this year’s edition of the FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics Report.

There were 1,122 hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2010, and 747 of them were Hispanic. Only 45% of the ethnic-bias hate crimes were against Hispanics in 2009. The release of the FBI report has come when anti-illegal immigration legislation has been spreading to several states.

A total of 47.3% of hate crimes in 2010 were based on race, with 20% based on religion, 19.3% based on sexual orientation, 12.8% based on national origin, and a mere 0.6% based on disability. Of the 6,008 known

offenders, 58.6% were white and 18.4% were black.

A “victim”, as defined in the report, can be an individual, a business, an institution, or society as a whole.

“Almost a fourth of our 2010 civil rights caseload involved crimes motivated by a particular bias against the victim,” said Eric Thomas, civil rights chief in Washington, D.C.

“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.”