On August 30, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its annual hate crime statistics for 2020 . After claims by some Hindu groups ab...
On August 30, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its annual hate crime statistics for 2020. After claims by some Hindu groups about rising “Hinduphobia” in the US and of imminent threats to the safety of Hindu students on our campuses, I was curious to see what the report says about incidents of faith-based bias against Hindus.
The report, by the domestic intelligence service of the United States, has a comprehensive definition of what constitutes a hate crime: it covers all forms of biases, including assaults, intimidation, property vandalism and more.
I was relieved to find that anti-Hindu hate crimes ranked towards the bottom. The category was 31st among 35 groups listed. In 2020, there were 12 incidents against Hindus, compared to 951 incidents against Jews, 134 against Muslims, and 72 against Sikhs. To give another perspective, anti-black hate crimes were listed at 3,886 and anti-Asian at 335.
The FBI said in a press release about the latest statistics, “There were 7,554 single-bias incidents involving 10,528 victims. A percent distribution of victims by bias type shows that 61.9 percent of victims were targeted because of the offenders’ race/ethnicity/ancestry bias, 20.5 percent were victimised because of the offenders’ sexual-orientation bias, 13.4 percent were targeted because of the offenders’...
