Why is Government Hate Crimes Data So Terrible?
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2021
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
Anti-Asian violence in the United States seems to be on the rise. On March 16, a shooter killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women, at several Atlanta businesses. Across the country, Asian-Americans have shared stories of attacks and harassment, some of which involved racist language in connection with the coronavirus pandemic.
Yet there is very little data available that could help journalists and policymakers make sense of this apparent trend. To understand why, Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and the co-founder of AH Datalytics, who recently wrote for Lawfare on why there’s so little reliable data on anti-Asian violence—or on any other kind of hate crime. Jeff discussed the patchwork system by which the FBI currently collects data on hate crimes, what other factors might explain why the data is so unreliable and how improved data could help guide the response to anti-Asian attacks.
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Transcript
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.0 | And so what we get is basically the number of agencies that reported data in a giving |
| 0:38.3 | year and the amount of data that they reported. |
| 0:41.0 | We don't actually get a good estimate of what the national crime numbers are in any year. |
| 0:49.0 | And this is especially problematic because murder is defined very specifically. |
| 0:53.5 | Hate crimes are kind of up to the state and the individual agency to decide what they |
| 0:59.7 | are. |
| 1:00.7 | And so it makes it very difficult to know, did hate crimes go up nationally because there |
| 1:07.8 | was better reporting in a given year because more actual hate crimes occurred in a given |
| 1:12.4 | year because agencies changed how they defined hate crimes in a given year or was it all |
| 1:16.7 | three of those. |
| 1:18.8 | I'm Quintedurussec and this is the LawFair podcast. |
| 1:23.0 | March 30th, 2021. |
| 1:26.8 | Anti-Asian violence in the United States seems to be on the rise. |
| 1:31.0 | On March 16th, a shooter killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women, at several |
| 1:36.6 | Atlanta businesses. |
| 1:38.9 | Across the country, Asian Americans have shared stories of attacks and harassment, some |
| 1:43.4 | of which involved racist language and connection with the coronavirus pandemic. |
... |
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