The Meme Policeman #fundie

The Meme Policeman #fundie facebook.com

In response to a meme about hate crimes being on the rise during Trump's presidency...

This widely shared meme echoes the popular narrative that hate crimes are rapidly on the rise. The reality is that FBI hate crime data hasn’t even been released for 2017 yet! This means we don’t even have data from when Trump was in office. The latest data is from 2016.
Still, we can compare 2015-16 and see how hate crimes changed during the initial “rise of Trump”. In researching this, I found most of the media reporting to be extremely shallow and unhelpful. Few dug very deep into the statistics, so I looked at them myself and found several interesting trends, many that were virtually unreported.
-Total hate crimes indeed rose slightly, and rose against Muslims and Hispanics. This was widely reported, and few outlets went beyond this.
-Of all racial groups, anti-white hate crimes rose the most. Anti-black crimes actually fell. This was rarely reported.
-In looking at who committed hate crimes, white offenders actually decreased slightly. Black offenders increased appreciably and Hispanic offenders increased dramatically. This was completely unreported, at least from what I could find, but an amazing statistic. “During the rise of Trump, white hate crime offenders actually fell” is not a headline we saw.
-Most of the increase was from acts of vandalism. Violent hate crimes didn’t increase with any significance.
Many more findings and details, including sources, are in the link below, so please check it out. With all the shenanigans with pages being deleted on FB I'll be doing more content on the website.

10 comments

old comment by Happy Atheist

I took a look at their analysis and sources, because evidence is important. Their problem with the 'meme' they're policing is that it only takes its figures from the short period of time between the election and the end of 2016, there being no official FBI data for 2017 yet available. A fair enough issue to raise, as a few months is admittedly a short time from which to make broad statements.

However.

They then go on to provide a 'better' analysis by comparing 2015's data to that of 2016, under the impression that as 2016 included Trump's initial campaign, the entire year could be used to broaden the data. The problem is, no one thought Trump would win. It was his election that gave tacit permission to the racists and bigots to act how they wanted - hence the 'meme' beginning with the statement 'Hate crimes have increased dramatically since the 2016 election'.

The data they are working from is both incomplete, and arbitrary in its beginning and end points. There was no switch flicked on January 1st 2016 that made it Trump Time. You want to really analyse the truth of this 'meme', you'll have to wait until the 2017 data is released. Until then, the best we can do is analyse what little actual post-election data we have, and compare it to the pre-election data.

What this person has done is GIGO, and it is less statistically sound than small data pools.

old comment by Nemo

Chloe,

I went to the guy's site, and he pulled that stat from the F.B.I. hate crime statistics. The F.B.I. definition of a hate crime encompasses any crime committed against a person, property, or society that was motivated in whole or part by bias against the victim's race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The following is a direct quote from the Meme Policeman website, which he says is from the F.B.I.

"Here’s how things changed with race-based hate crimes from 2015-16:
Anti-white- Increased 17% (613 to 720)
Anti-black- Decreased <1% (1,745 to 1,739, this is essentially unchanged)
Anti-Hispanic- Increased 15% (299 to 344)
It should be noted that anti-black hate crimes still occur at over 2 times the rate of white ones, but the trends are not what one would expect from this meme or media coverage. Ironically, it was anti-white hate crimes that increased most."

He later states: "Analyzing the victims is just one half of the equation, what about the offenders? Again, the results here run counter to the mainstream narrative, and what the meme suggests. From 2015-16, here are how things changed:
White Offenders- Decreased by 3% (2,761 to 2,680)
Black Offenders- Increased by 18% (1,129 to 1,3331)
Hispanic Offenders- Increased by 40% (182 to 254)
Clearly, most hate crimes are still committed by whites, although by percentage of population blacks commit more. The trend, however, fell slightly for whites in the year of Trump, rose appreciably for blacks and skyrocketed for Hispanics. This appears to be virtually unreported by the media."

I'll be leaving for work soon, so I don't have time to check to see if the F.B.I. did actually say this or not, but if so, this isn't really fundy, other than maybe we should wait for the 2017 data to be released.

old comment by Nemo

Good news everyone! You all read that in the voice of a certain professor! Also, the 2017 data for hate crimes is out. Here is what we have for the bias which motivated the hate crimes, pulled from the report itself:

By bias motivation (Based on Table 1.)
An analysis of data for victims of single-bias hate crime incidents showed that:
59.6 percent of the victims were targeted because of the offenders’ bias against race/ethnicity/ancestry.
20.6 percent were victimized because of bias against religion.
15.8 percent were targeted because of bias against sexual orientation.
1.9 percent were targeted because of bias against disability.
1.6 percent were victims of gender-identity bias.
0.6 percent (54 individuals) were victims of gender bias.
Further examination of these bias categories showed the following details:

Racial/ethnicity/ancestry bias (Based on Table 1.)
Among single-bias hate crime incidents in 2017, there were 5,060 victims of race/ethnicity/ancestry motivated hate crime.
48.6 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Black or African American bias.
17.1 percent were victims of anti-White bias.
10.9 percent were victims of anti-Hispanic or Latino bias.
6.3 percent were victims of anti-American Indian or Alaska Native bias.
4.5 percent were victims of bias against a group of individuals in which more than one race was represented (anti-multiple races, group).
3.3 percent were victims of anti-Asian bias.
2.6 percent were victims of anti-Arab bias.
0.4 percent (18 individuals) were victims of anti-Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander bias.
6.4 percent were victims of anti-Other Race/Ethnicity/Ancestry bias.

Religious bias (Based on Table 1.)
Of the 1,749 victims of anti-religious hate crimes:
58.1 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Jewish bias.
18.6 percent were victims of anti-Islamic (Muslim) bias.
4.3 percent were victims of anti-Catholic bias.
3.3 percent were victims of bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).
2.3 percent were victims of anti-Protestant bias.
1.8 percent were victims of anti-Other Christian bias.
1.5 percent were victims of anti-Eastern Orthodox (Russian, Greek, Other) bias.
1.5 percent were victims of anti-Sikh bias.
0.9 percent (15 individuals) were victims of anti-Hindu bias.
0.9 percent (15 individuals) were victims of anti-Mormon bias.
0.7 percent (13 individuals) were victims of anti-Jehovah’s Witness bias.
0.7 percent (12 individuals) were victims of anti-Buddhist bias.
0.5 percent (8 individuals) were victims of anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
4.9 percent were victims of bias against other religions (anti-other religion).

Sexual-orientation bias (Based on Table 1.)
Of the 1,338 victims targeted due to sexual-orientation bias:
57.8 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-gay (male) bias.
24.9 percent were victims of anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (mixed group) bias.
12.3 percent were victims of anti-lesbian bias.
2.8 percent were victims of anti-heterosexual bias.
2.2 percent were victims of anti-bisexual bias.

Gender-identity bias (See Table 1.)
Of the 132 victims of gender-identity bias:
119 were victims of anti-transgender bias.
13 were victims of anti-gender non-conforming bias.

Gender bias (See Table 1.)
Of the 54 victims of hate crime motivated by offenders’ biases toward gender:
28 were categorized as anti-female.
26 were anti-male.

old comment by Nemo

A few notes. First of all is that hate crimes based on gender appear to be pretty evenly split between men and women. Second, in their category for offenders, whites make up a little over half of the perpetrators of hate crimes. Third, regarding the types of crime committed:
"Law enforcement reported 5,084 hate crime offenses as crimes against persons. By offense type:
44.9 percent were intimidation.
34.3 percent were simple assault.
19.5 percent were aggravated assault.
0.7 percent consisted of 15 murders and 23 rapes. (See Methodology for more details about changes in the definition of rape in the UCR Program.)
1 offense was reported as human trafficking, commercial sex acts.
0.5 percent involved the offense category other, which is collected only in NIBRS."