FBI: US hits 16-year high Hate crime violence in 2018

Violence resulting from bias or prejudice in the United States reached a 16-year high last year, the FBI said on Tuesday, with the number of victims in anti-Latino or Hispanic hate crimes rising more than 21 percent.

The data coincides with an ongoing debate over President Donald Trump's hardline immigration policies and follows the August 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, when the suspected gunman told police he was singling out Mexicans.

"Attacks against Muslims peaked around 2016 when terrorism was the concern. Now immigration is the number one issue and Latinos are being targeted."

There were 671 victims in anti-Latino or Hispanic incidents in 2018, compared with 552 the year before, the FBI said in its annual Hate Crime Statistics report.

The FBI said that hate crimes overall fell slightly in 2018 after three years of increases, with 7,120 reported incidents. The agency did not offer a reason for the decrease. But the 0.77 percent drop in incidents roughly matches the percentage decrease in the number of police departments that voluntarily sent data to the FBI in 2018.

Despite the slight fall, violence against individuals increased, the FBI said, pointing specifically to the increase of the number of "crimes against persons", instead of property.

The latest FBI data showed an 11.7 percent raise last year in the number of hate crimes that involved the physical or verbal assault of a person, and the number of hate-crime homicides hit its highest level yet with 24 murder victims.

The FBI report showed white individuals made up 53.6 percent of the known criminals who carried out the attacks. That is an increase of nearly three percentage points.