2015 FBI data: Jews were nearly 3X more likely than blacks, 1.5X more likely than Muslims to be a hate crime victim
Blacks attacking Jewish girl
Members of which of these groups were most likely to be a victim of a hate crime in 2015: Muslims, Blacks or Jews?
Based on media coverage, you would have to say Muslims or Blacks. According to a Google news search for the term “hate crimes” along with the name of each of those three groups, there are 164,000 results for “hate crimes” + black, 134,000 results for “hate crimes” + Muslims and only 36,400 results for “hate crimes” + Jews. Based on news reports, you would think that blacks were 4.5 times more likely than Jews to be the victim of a hate crime and that Muslims were almost 4 times more than likely than Jews to be a hate crime victim.
And yet recently released hate crime data from the FBI for 2015 reveal that there were 1,745 African-American victims of hate crimes last year, 664 Jewish victims of anti-religious hate crimes and 257 Muslim hate crime victims. Adjusting for the population size of each group (42.75 million blacks, 5.7 million Jews and 3.3 million Muslims), the hate crime victimization rates last year per 100,000 population were 11.6 for Jews, 7.8 for Muslims and 4.1 for blacks (see chart above). Therefore, American Jews were nearly three times more likely than blacks to be a victim of a hate crime last year, and 1.5 times more likely than a Muslim to be a hate crime victim.
A 12-year-old Jewish boy who was a victim of the black “knockout a Jew game”
The FBI data for 2015 on anti-religion hate crimes also reveal that of the 1,244 victims of anti-religious hate crimes last year in the US, 664 were Jewish (53.4% of the total) and 257 were Muslim (20.7% of the total). Obviously, since more than half (53.4%) of the anti-religious hate crime victims in 2015 were Jewish, there were more Jewish victims last year of anti-religious hate crimes (664) than victims of all other religious groups combined (580).
Question: Based on the actual rates of hate crime victimization and the fact that Jews are so disproportionately targeted, wouldn’t we have to conclude that hate crimes against Jews are routinely under-reported by the media relative to the reporting of hate crimes against blacks and Muslims?
