Hate crimes continue to be underreported across America — something that Queens Congress Member Grace Meng and U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand want to change.
The pair appeared together at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Monday and said that more needs to be done to ensure that law enforcement agencies are notifying the FBI about hate crimes. Currently, state and local police are only encouraged to notify the FBI about hate crimes, and it is not a mandatory.
The FBI, in its most recent Hate Crimes Statistics report, found that “a significant number of law enforcement agencies were failing to report hate crimes.” The agency released data that showed that only 11,834 agencies reported incidents in 2021, which was a decrease from 15,834 agencies reporting the year prior. The result led to a drop in the number of hate crimes reported.