How many hate crimes in USA recorded
Executive summary
The most recent federal tally shows 11,679 hate crime incidents reported to the FBI for calendar year 2024, involving 14,243 victims, a figure released by the Department of Justice drawing on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program (2024 data) [1]. That number follows years of record-high incident totals (11,634 incidents in 2022) and rising city-level counts, but it must be read alongside important caveats about underreporting and gaps in the national data collection system [2] [3] [4].
1. What the headline numbers say: 2024 and recent years
Federal publications and summary pages state that law enforcement agencies reported 11,679 hate crime incidents involving 14,243 victims for 2024, a concrete count drawn from agencies that submitted reports to the FBI’s hate-crime program [1]. For context, the FBI recorded 11,634 hate crime incidents in 2022 — the highest total at that time — and that elevated baseline helped advocacy groups to declare multiple consecutive record years for reported incidents [2] [3].
2. How victims and incidents are counted in the federal data
The FBI’s hate-crime series distinguishes incidents (the discrete bias-motivated criminal acts) and victims; the 2022 release noted over 11,000 single-bias incidents involving about 13,278 victims plus additional multiple-bias incidents and victims, demonstrating that incident and victim tallies are related but not identical measures [3]. The DOJ’s 2024 headline similarly pairs incidents and victims — 11,679 incidents and 14,243 victims — reflecting that some incidents involve multiple victims or multiple offenses [1].
3. Local spikes vs national snapshots: big-city and center reports
Independent center and city-level studies have documented sharp jumps in many large cities that sometimes outpace national averages: a report aggregating big cities found record totals and average increases around 22% in 2022 for the largest municipalities, and city-level police data showed spikes — for example, Los Angeles reported hundreds of victims and New York City reported record antisemitic incidents in 2022 [5] [6]. Those local datasets often reveal patterns and peaks that are masked when data are pooled into national totals.
4. Data quality, coverage, and the undercount problem
Federal tallies are the best centralized source but are incomplete: participation rates and coverage vary by year — for 2022 the FBI noted participation by 14,631 agencies with population coverage around 91.7% but other summaries cite that reporting represented roughly 77.5% of enrolled agencies, indicating both improved coverage and persistent gaps [3] [7]. International observers and researchers also note that the United States has not been reporting prosecution and judiciary data on hate crimes to some international bodies since 2018, which leaves a silent layer of cases outside the federal incident counts [4]. Congressional and academic reviews have repeatedly warned about undercounting and classification errors in law enforcement records [8].
5. Why the totals have climbed: reporting, real rises, or both?
Analysts and advocacy groups point to a mix of causes: better reporting and law-enforcement willingness to flag bias can raise counts even absent a true underlying jump, while researchers studying city and community trends also point to real increases in bias-motivated violence tied to political polarization, social-media amplification, and surges in particular bias targets (e.g., antisemitic, anti-Black, anti-Asian, and anti-LGBTQ+ incidents) [5] [2] [7]. Different observers emphasize different drivers — data-improvement versus genuine increases — and the evidence supports both as partial explanations [8].
6. Practical takeaway for readers seeking a single answer
If the question is “how many hate crimes in the USA were recorded,” the authoritative federal headline is 11,679 incidents involving 14,243 victims in 2024; earlier benchmark years include 11,634 incidents in 2022 [1] [3]. Those figures are accurate representations of what police reported into the FBI system, but they understate total bias victimizations because of nonreporting, incomplete agency participation, and gaps in prosecutorial data [7] [4] [8].