American Muslim women waving flags

Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act in 1990, and since then the FBI has been issuing annual reports on crimes of bias or hate crimes.

I thought it might be useful to compare the year 2000, Bill Clinton’s last in office, with 2013 and with 2014, the last two for which statistics are available, to see how the nation has changed.  Unsurprisingly, there has been an eight-fold increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes during these 14 years.

There are lots of caveats here.  The FBI depends on local police departments to report hate crimes, who in turn depend on victims to report them in the bulk of cases.  The whole country is not even covered.

Muslim-Americans are disproportionately first- and second-generation immigrants and while they are typically middle or upper middle class, they often came from countries where the police are not your friends, and they may be hesitant to report hate crimes against them.

Then, there aren’t that many hate crimes reported.  In 2000 […]