Hate crimes in the US increased by about 12 per cent in 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has said, highlighting that 64.5 per cent of victims were targeted because of race or ancestry bias.

In an update of its annual report issued on Monday, the FBI also said that 43.2 per cent of the total crimes recorded were related to intimidation.

"Nationally, reported hate crime incidents increased 11.6 per cent from 8,120 in 2020 to 9,065 in 2021," the FBI said, adding that the updated dataset for 2021 includes all law enforcement agency hate crime incident reporting.

The updated hate crime dataset reports involve 10,840 incidents and 12,411 related offences.

Over 10,500 single-bias incidents involved 12,411 victims, the report said.

A per cent distribution of victims by bias type shows that 64.5 per cent of victims were targeted because of the offenders’ race/ethnicity/ancestry bias, 15.9 per cent were targeted because of offenders’ sexual-orientation bias and 14.1 per cent were targeted because of the offenders’ religious bias, the report said.

There were 310 multiple-bias hate crime incidents that involved 411 victims.

Of the 8,327 hate crime offences classified as crimes against persons in the updated 2021 dataset, 43.2 per cent were intimidation, 35.5 per cent were simple assault, and 20.1 per cent were aggravated assault.

Nineteen rapes and 18 murders were reported as hate crimes.

The remaining 70 hate crime offences classified as crimes against persons were reported in the category of other.  Of the 3,817 hate crime offences classified as crimes against property, 71.2 per cent were acts of destruction/damage/vandalism, it said.  A total of 267 additional offences were classified as crimes against society.

This crime category represents society’s prohibition against engaging in certain types of activity such as gambling, prostitution, and drug violations. These are typically victimless crimes in which property is not the object, the FBI said in its report.

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