Hate Crimes Against Muslims In The US Increased Sharply In 2015

A candlelight vigil for three Muslim students shot dead by a white neighbor in North Carolina in February 2015.

Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty Images

Hate crimes against Muslims in the US rose by 67% in 2015 to the second highest percentage annual increase recorded since 1992, according FBI statistics released Monday.

The 67% rise from 2014 to 2015 was also the second largest number of anti-Muslim incidents tracked by the FBI since the bureau began releasing hate crime statistics in 1992.

There were 257 recorded anti-Muslim incidents in 2015, compared to 154 in 2014, according to the FBI report.

Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes 2012-2015

FBI

The number of hate crimes against Muslims in the US remained fairly low throughout the 1990s, never exceeding 48 incidents in a single year.

In 2001, after the September 11 attacks, the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes jumped by 1,618% from the previous year, with 481 recorded hate crime incidents, compared to 28 in 2000.

Experts have attributed the 2015 increase to reactions to the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, as well as a sharp rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric during the presidential primaries.

Findings from a report from earlier this year by Georgetown’s Bridge Initiative, a program dedicated to studying Islamophobia, almost mirrored the data released by the FBI. The report also found that in 2015, there were more “incidences of anti-Muslim violence and vandalism” than any other year since September 11th, 2001.

According to a June report published by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, there were nearly four times as many attacks against mosques in 2015 compared with 2014.

Incident Of Hate Crimes By Religion

FBI

Anti-Jewish hate crimes continue to remain high annually, and account for over 50 percent of all religious-based hates crimes. Anti-Jewish hate crimes were up by 9 percent from the previous year.

The annual hate crime statistics released by the FBI relies on data on recorded biased-crimes submitted by 14,997 law enforcement agencies nationwide. The report is broken down into six categories. Religion is only one of those categories.

Hate Crime Incidents By Catagory

FBI

The "Race/Ethnicity/Ancestry" catagory accounts for the majority of all recorded hate crimes incidents — and account for 57% of all hate crimes within the six categories. Within this catagory, "Anti-Black or African American" hate crimes surpassed any other group by almost a factor of three.

The other recorded categories in the report are sexual orientation, disability, gender and gender identity.

Read more of the FBI statistics here:

LINK: There Was A Huge Increase In Attacks On Mosques Last Year

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