When the FBI released its latest nationwide report on crime in August, headlines keyed on dramatic drops in violent crime.
According to the data in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR), murders — at a 20-year low — and robberies were each down more than 18% nationwide. Rape and aggravated assault were both down more than 7% each. Even hate crimes reflected a 7% decline in 2025.
But other headlines throughout the year painted another picture. The bodies of Black people, most officially labeled as suicides but disputed as such by family and legal advocates, have been found hanging from trees in the past year. Attacks on Black trans women have continued across the nation, especially in the South. Synagogue attacks, most notably in Michigan and Mississippishowed that antisemitism was still alive and well in the United States.
What the headlines fail to address is that the UCR is highly inaccurate, largely due to a lack of any requirement for the law enforcement agencies reporting the data to get it right — or to report at all.
Even as the overall number of reported hate crimes declined, anti-Black hate accounted for the largest number of race-based hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2025. Anti-Hispanic and anti-Latine hate crimes increased in 2025 amid the administration’s brutal and draconian immigration enforcement campaign, compounding the threats facing immigrant communities, including Black immigrants.
In recognition of Hate Crimes Awareness Month in October, the Southern Poverty Law Center alerts the public, advocates, policymakers and politicians to the problem of hate crimes and presses for action to prevent them.
“Even in data we know is incomplete, anti-Black hate is the largest category of race-based hate crime in this country,” said Ryan Haygood, president and CEO of the SPLC. “That is not new, and it is not an accident. It is by design. And what is designed can be dismantled.
“Here in the Deep South, where the SPLC has confronted hate and extremism for more than five decades, we know that institutions have too long allowed white supremacy to thrive unfettered,” Haygood said. “Dismantling it means confronting both the acts of hate and the systems that allow it to persist. That starts with mandatory law enforcement reporting so we can see the full scope of hate communities experience, and a fierce commitment from all of us to examine the structures that prop up these dangerous ideologies.”
This week, the SPLC confronted hate and systems that allow it by asking the U.S. Congress and the United Nations to conduct an independent examination of the deaths of Black people across the South in recent months and to provide better federal data collection.
The SPLC is also calling specifically for a full and fair investigation into the death of Nolan Wells18, who died after a Fourth of July boat trip to Horn Island, Mississippi. The cause and manner of Wells’ death are “undetermined” and no one has been charged.
But Wells’ death has prompted speculation and distrust from family members and racial justice advocates due, in part, to Mississippi’s fraught history of racial violence.
“When Michael Donald was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mobile, Alabama, his body hung from a tree, and local authorities first looked elsewhere,” Haygood said in an SPLC statement. “It took the persistence of his mother, Beulah Mae Donald, a federal investigation and our lawsuit, brought with civil rights lawyer and Alabama state Sen. Michael Figures, to establish the truth and hold the Klan accountable. That same rigor is required now, as families across the South grieve loved ones found hanging from trees. Every one of these deaths demands an investigation that is beyond reproach. Families deserve the truth.”
‘The underlying pattern remains consistent’
For those who track hate-based crimes and groups, the cognitive dissonance between official FBI numbers and the headlines may come down to either errant or missing crime reports from law enforcement agencies. Those same advocates say that the threat of bias-motivated violence, whether keyed to race, nationality, religion or gender, remains very real for the people in these targeted communities.
In the previous 12 months ending in August, the Crime Data Explorer shows that there were 10,160 hate crime incidents. Of those, 5,399 were racially motivated. And during that period, more than half of all racially motivated hate crimes reported in the U.S. (2,800) were directed against people who are Black.
Erin Wilson, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, addressed the numbers in her comments following the release of this year’s UCR.
“Black Americans remain the single largest target of race-based hate crimes,” Wilson said. “These numbers shift slightly from year to year, but the underlying pattern remains consistent.
“This administration has created a climate that allows hate to fester and flourish. And in many cases, particularly involving Black and Brown immigrants, they are outright perpetrating hate,” Wilson said. “In order to create a safer and more inclusive democracy, all communities must reject hate-motivated violence wherever and whenever it occurs. And our nation must invest in programs that promote prevention and challenge the onslaught of hateful ideologies and conspiracy theories in public discourse that underpin bias-motivated violence and result in real-world harm.”
According to the SPLC’s Year in Hate and Extremism report, the normalization of extremist rhetoric has dominated the political climate, enabling and encouraging bad actors to harass, attack and dehumanize Black and Brown communities, religious minorities, women, LGBTQ+ people and other groups.
In 2025, the Trump administration also took concrete action to undermine initiatives designed to address hate crimes, terminating hundreds of violence prevention grants — including hate crime prevention and anti-extremism grants — and dismantling a national database used to track hate crimes and domestic terrorism.
Across the Deep South, the latest data on hate crimes from the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer (which is updated throughout the year, unlike the UCR) shows some implausible numbers. In Mississippi, for example, there were only 59 hate crime incidents reported in 2025; in 2026, as of August, there have only been 24 reports.
In Louisiana, there were only 86 reported hate crime incidents in 2025 — and only 35 through the first eight months of 2026.
While the UCR is the better-known report, the U.S. Department of Justice also creates other reports, like the Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Victimization report. In 2024, the last year currently available for that report, fewer than half of people who were victims of a crime reported it to law enforcement. Because the UCR is a composite of data submitted to the FBI from local law enforcement agencies, the final product is only as accurate as the information reported at the local level.
‘Only the tip of the iceberg’
Advocates say the low UCR numbers stem from several flaws in how hate crimes are handled. For example, many law enforcement agencies do not recognize hate as a motivating factor in the crimes they investigate.
“There are a number of issues,” said Aamra Ahmad, a senior policy counsel on civil rights for the SPLC’s policy team. “There’s the training of people on the ground who are doing this reporting. Some local and state law enforcement say, ‘Well, we don’t decide what a hate crime is. The prosecutor decides.’ So agencies need better training on what conduct they should report as a hate crime.”
Another issue Ahmad pointed out is the lack of any consequences if agencies simply don’t file complete data to the FBI for use in the UCR.
“There’s also no penalty for failure to participate,” Ahmad said. “So there’s no harm [for the agencies] in not reporting. There’s also no penalty for not reporting accurately.”
According to the latest data from the FBI, the overall number of hate crimes declined from more than 12,700 incidents in 2024 to just under 11,800 incidents in 2025. However, the SPLC cautions that the FBI’s publicly available hate crime data is an inadequate measure of harm. Hate incidents are historically underreported because people who have experienced violence are often reluctant to seek help from law enforcement, and law enforcement reporting is voluntary and inconsistent.
According to an assessment from the Arab American Institute of the latest UCR, only 16,791, or 86%, of the enrolled agencies submitted any hate crime data. More than 50 cities across the nation with populations higher than 100,000 did not report any crime data at all.
Because of underreporting, experts say the danger hate crimes pose, especially in targeted communities, is still hard to gauge. The one thing that all agree on is that the threat is real.
“We cannot look at hate crime data in isolation from a broader political climate targeting Black and Brown communities,” Wilson said. “Across the country, brutal and draconian immigration enforcement has created fear among Latine and other immigrant communities. Political rhetoric from the hard right consistently casts immigrants as ‘invaders,’ part of a ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.”
The UCR reported 862 reported anti-Hispanic or anti-Latine hate crimes during 2024. In 2025, that number was 1,079 — a 25% increase. While that number is likely much lower than the reality, it still shows a dramatic increase in the number of cases tracked, even if the system is flawed.
“Unsurprisingly, this past year’s data reflects an increase in anti-Hispanic and anti-Latine hate crimes,” Wilson said. “We also know that this annual report reflects only the tip of the iceberg.”
Finding an effective system
The debate over crime statistics in general and hate crimes in particular is not new. But there are some proposed legislative options that would at least improve the efficiency of our current reporting system.
And, like anything that comes through Congress, it creates a mechanism that would hold the local law enforcement agencies responsible for accurate and timely reporting of data — if the proposal ever makes it into law with its teeth intact.
“It would create a sort of a penalty for not reporting hate crime data unless the attorney general certifies that the covered jurisdiction has conducted significant community public education and awareness initiatives on hate crimes,” said Lisa Borden, deputy director of the SPLC’s federal policy team. “So, they would still have an out on providing statistics, but would be doing other work that would help with the reporting of hate crimes by educating the public.”
In her position with the SPLC, Borden has also worked through the United Nations to bring issues of systemic racial injustice to light. She explained how the U.N.’s human rights system could be used to shine a spotlight on hate, despite any legislative bite behind it.
“U.N. officials don’t have any hard enforcement mechanisms, but they can send what’s called an allegation letter to the authorities to outline a problem and try to seek information,” Borden said. “Most jurisdictions in the United States will ignore that. But once the deadline for responding passes, those letters can be made public. Advocates can use the fact that the U.N. intervened in a case to try to create more public interest, which hopefully puts pressure on elected officials to make improvements.”
But, like Hate Crimes Awareness Month itself, people must become motivated and involved in order for it to work.
“International pressure and public shame are what the U.N. has to rely on,” Borden said. “Which, in and of itself, can be effective.”
Hate Crimes Awareness Month continues through Oct. 31. The SPLC’s Intelligence Project offers a number of resources for responding to hate. The SPLC’s Learning for Justice program also provides guidance on how to resist hate in education.
Dwayne Fatherree is the editor, special projects for the SPLC.
Image at top: Photo illustration by the SPLC (Source images from AP and iStock)
Source: www.splcenter.org
