I must have pissed off more people than I thought...

"Hate Crimes Reported to FBI Rise"

By JENNIFER LOVEN
.c The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - Crimes reported to the FBI as triggered by prejudice
against the victim's color, religion, disability, national origin or sexual
orientation rose 2 percent in 2000, the bureau announced Monday.

In its annual tally of hate crimes, the FBI said local law enforcers reported
8,063 incidents in 2000. The data were supplied by 11,690 local law
enforcement agencies in 48 states and the District of Columbia whose
jurisdictions include 84 percent of the population.

The 2000 total was 187 higher than the 7,876 hate crimes reported in 1999,
even though the information came from 432 fewer police agencies.

It is because of the varying number of agencies reporting under the voluntary
system established by the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990 that officials
caution against drawing conclusions about trends in hate crimes between
years.

They say the figures provide instead a rough picture of the general nature of
hate crimes.

Intimidation was the most frequent of hate crimes, at 35 percent of the
total. Vandalism and destruction of property accounted for 29 percent of
reported offenses, simple assault for 17 percent and aggravated assault for
13 percent, the FBI said. Those breakdowns were similar to the data in
previous years.

Nineteen people were murdered in 2000 hate crimes, up from 17 the year
before, with 10 attributed to race bias, six to prejudice against ethnic or
national origin, two to bias against sexual orientation and one to religious
bias, the FBI said.

In May, for instance, a white, unemployed lawyer was convicted and sentenced
to death for killing his Jewish neighbor, a black man and men from China,
India and Vietnam while driving through Pittsburgh suburbs April 28, 2000,
looking for minorities to target.

Other high-profile 2000 incidents included attacks on two black churches and
an NAACP office in South Carolina, for which two white teen-agers were
convicted; a shooting outside a Memphis, Tenn., mosque; and the
spray-painting of a mural of abolitionist Harriet Tubman at a middle school
in a Baltimore suburb.

As in previous years, most of the 9,430 hate crimes victims - 55 percent in
2000 - were targeted because of their race. Blacks were by far the most
frequent victims of hate crimes, totaling 36 percent of all victims.

Another 17 percent of hate crimes victims were singled out because of
religion, followed by 16 percent for sexual orientation, 12 percent for
ethnic or national origin and a negligible number for physical disability. Of
the victims of religious prejudice, three-quarters were Jewish.

On the Net: FBI: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm

AP-NY-11-19-01 1727EST

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