The organization said in a report released last month the surges coincided with anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric from Trump and his allies, citing spikes in December when Trump, billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy sparked a public dispute over the H-1B visa program and in January amid scrutiny of Chinese-owned companies including TikTok and DeepSeek AI.
What’s happening online often corresponds with hate incidents in the real world and their data can shed light on gaps in official data that result from underreporting and the challenges of prosecuting hate, Stop AAPI Hate’s co-founder, Manjusha Kulkarni, said.
“Most law enforcement agencies only collect hate crime specific data, and while that is valuable to tell us what criminal acts are happening, our own data at Stop AAPI hate has shown that a vast majority of hate incidents or hate acts are not crimes at all. … I don’t think we have a full understanding of what it is our community members are experiencing,” she said.
Hate crime data flawed
The FBI defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias(es) against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” Law enforcement agencies reported more than 12,000 hate crimes to the bureau in 2023, according to the bureau’s most recent data.
But it’s not mandatory for all of the country’s more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies to submit data to the federal government and national data on these crimes is notoriously flawed.
“There’s difficulty along every step of the reporting chain, from victims not reporting at all to victims reporting, but it’s not necessarily being labeled as a potential hate crime,” Levin said.
Levin added that if a law enforcement agency is in the process of changing the way it tracks these crimes, they may not have a full year’s worth of data to send to the FBI before its annual report is released.
Although the latest FBI data has been updated since it was first released in September, Levin said it still appears to be missing hundreds of victims from California. The number of hate crime victims attributed to the Los Angeles Police Department by state and county officials don’t appear to match either, he said.
When asked about the discrepancies, a spokesperson for the FBI said its data represents information submitted by the state of California for the LAPD and directed questions to the department.
“What a specific police department defines as a hate crime may be different than that of the FBI’s UCR Program. This leaves the potential for a difference in results between the local standard and the national standard used to ensure uniformity in reporting statistics across the nation,” the FBI statement said.
USA TODAY has reached out to the LAPD, the state attorney general’s office, and the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations for comment. Levin acknowledged his data isn’t complete either, but said the snapshot his reports capture help illustrate broader, troubling trends seen across the country.
“Even with declines, we are hovering either at, slightly above or off records, and are historically elevated because this has been a bad decade,” he said.
