Fact check: 2019 was deadly year for hate crimes but identities of killers not clear

Adrienne Dunn, USA TODAY
·3 min read

The claim: 2019 was deadliest year for hate crimes; most killers were white men

Hate crimes, which are motivated by prejudice against race, religion or sexual orientation, have been on the rise in the U.S. for years due to an increase in frequency and also possibly influenced by improved methods of reporting.

Each year, the FBI releases a report of the previous year's documented hate crimes. The reports include information about the victims, locations, offenders and the type of crime.

Following the release of the most recent report, which documented hate crimes from 2019, Shaun King, an activist and writer, posted about the statistics on his Instagram page.

"2019 was the deadliest year for hate crime murders since the FBI began collecting data in the early 90s. Almost every killer was a white man," King said. "And more total hate crimes happened in 2019 than any single year in over a decade."

What do the numbers show?

King's claim that the total number of reported hate crimes in 2019 was the highest in more than a decade is correct. Before last year's report, 2008 had the highest number of reported cases, with 7,783 incidents.

The FBI's 2019 hate crime statistics report includes data from 15,588 law enforcement agencies. According to the report, there were 7,314 documented hate crimes in 2019, an increase of 194 compared to the previous year.

The most documented motives for hate crimes in 2019 were biases against race, ethnicity or ancestry, which accounted for 55.8% of the reported incidents, and bias against religion, which accounted for 21.4%.

King's claim that 2019 was the "deadliest year for hate crime murders" since the FBI started collecting this data in the early 1990s also is correct.

The 2019 report documented 51 hate crime murders, 22 of which include those who died as a result of a shooting targeting Mexicans in El Paso, Texas.

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King's final claim in his post is that "almost every killer was a white man."

According to the report, 19 offenders committed murder, which accounts for 0.4% of the total hate crime offenders from the 2019 report.

The report does not break down the reported hate crime murderers by race or gender. Of the 6,406 offenders, which were not all killers, where race was reported, 52.5% of them were white people.

Details of individual incidents are not included in the FBI's hate crime reports, which makes it difficult to identify the location of crimes or offenders in other mediums, like news reports.

For this reason, USA TODAY is unable to determine the accuracy of King's claim that "almost every killer was a white man."

USA TODAY reached out to King for comment and evidence to support this part of the claim but has not received a response.

Our ruling: Partly false

The claims in the post have been rated PARTLY FALSE. King's claims that 2019 had more total hate crimes than any other year in the past decade and that it was the deadliest year on record are correct.

Since gender and race are not available for every reported hate crime, King's claim that almost every hate crime murder offender was a white man is unsupported by our research.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: 2019 deadly year for hate crimes; killers' IDs not clear