TRACKING HATE

U.S. Saw Record Number of Hate Crime Murders in 2019, FBI Says

Of the 51 murders included in the data—released by the bureau on Monday—22 were from a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that targeted Hispanics.

The U.S. saw 51 hate crime murders in 2019, the most since the FBI began tracking those statistics in the early 1990s, according to data released by the bureau Monday.

That number includes the 22 killed in an August 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The suspected shooter told authorities he was “targeting Mexicans,” according to the Associated Press.

The FBI describes hate crimes as those with “bias toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity.” Overall, the bureau received 7,314 reports of these criminal incidents, according to a press release.

The numbers might not tell the full story, however. Of the 15,588 law enforcement agencies that sent their crime data to the FBI in 2019, only 2,172 of them reported any hate crimes, according to the release. In 2017, the murder of protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, by a neo-Nazi was not initially recorded in the FBI’s crime data, according to CNN.