Hate Crimes: Race, Ethnicity, Sexual Orientation, Religion

Hate crimes have been going on in the world for years. They are criminal actions that are intended to people because of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or other minority group status. They are also referred to as a bias crime. A hate crime is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias. According to the FBI they define a hate crime as: Criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity. Hate itself is not a crimeand the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties. A lot people who commit these crimes have multiple motivations to go through with them. It is hard to predict or prevent hate crimes because we really won't know who these people will be.

Nowadays they are different targets of hate crimes and every perpetrator have different reasons in which they think justify their crime. However, never in a million years will there be a justified answer also nor will there be reasons why hate crimes are committed. In all honesty there's only two reasons why hate crimes are committed in the first place which is ignorance and stupidity. In FBI statistics it shows 59.6% of the hate crimes has to do with Race/Ethnicity, 20.6% Religion, 15.8% Sexual orientation, 1.9% Disability, Gender identity 1.6%, and the least is 0.6% Gender. The number of hate crime incidents reported to the FBI increased about 17 percent in 2017 compared with the previous year, according to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program's annual Hate Crime Statistics report. Law enforcement reported 7,175 hate crimes to UCR in 2017, up from 6,121 in 2016. Hate crimes affect a whole community because of who these perpetrators attack, thousands of people are physically and at times brutally attacked.

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/civil-rights/hate-crimes

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2017-hate-crime-statistics-released-111318

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