In recent times, a disturbing pattern of potentially racially motivated attacks has unfolded against individuals of Indian origin in the USA. Data from the FBI’s UCR database indicates that the number of hate crime incidents in the USA increased significantly in the last few years including those with bias motivation closely linked to Indians. In recent times, a disturbing pattern of potentially racially motivated attacks has unfolded against individuals of Indian origin in the USA. These incidents have reignited concerns about the safety and security of Indian students across the nation. A member of Parliament from the Opposition Party had also raised this issue and asked the government to probe if there was any ‘hate crime’ angle to these deaths during the Zero Hour of the latest budget session. In response to these developments, the White House has issued a statement affirming the nation’s commitment to thwarting and disrupting such attacks targeting Indians and those of Indian origin. Emphasizing a zero-tolerance policy, they’ve declared that violence rooted in race, gender, religion, or any other factor is unequivocally unacceptable within the United States. In today’s story, we look at the trends in Hate crimes in the United States. Data collection and methodology: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program provides a comprehensive definition of hate crime, identifying it as a criminal offence driven, either wholly or partially, by the offender’s bias against a particular race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity. The legislative foundation for monitoring hate crimes was laid with the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 23 April 1990, mandating the Attorney General to compile data on crimes displaying evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. The Hate Crime Statistics Data Collection under UCR gathers information on criminal offences motivated by bias against the victim’s race, ethnicity, ancestry, gender, gender identity, religion, disability, or sexual orientation, encompassing acts against individuals, property, or society. The data collection underwent many changes since its inception, some of them being the addition of Gender and gender identification as a bias motivation since 2013, individual race and ethnicity bias motivation have been clubbed under a single category from 2015 among others. Further, the compiled hate crime data for each incident encompasses various elements: One can find the cleaned and standardized datasets of the above data from Dataful here. Historic Levels of Hate Crime Incidents reported in the United States in 2022 The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program is responsible for compiling data on hate crimes, including those motivated by single or multiple biases. Law enforcement agencies are required to specify at least one bias motivation for each reported offence type. A single-bias incident is characterized by one or more offence types being driven by the same bias. A multiple-bias incident is described as “an incident where one or more types of offences are motivated by two or more biases.” Each incident can involve multiple offences and multiple victims. The data on the hate crime incidents show that 2022 recorded the highest levels of incidents, with 11,634 total incidents, up from 10,840 in the previous year. 2021 also marked the first time since the number of incidents rose above ten thousand. From 8,063 incidents in 2000, the hate crime incidents rose by 44%, reaching 11,634 in 2022. The data also shows that more than 97% of hate crime incidents are single-bias incidents. The target of a hate crime may be an individual, a business or financial institution, a government entity, a religious organization, or society in general. The number of victims rose from 9,924 to a record 13,711 during the same period, rising by 38%. Almost 60% of the hate crime incidents are motivated by Race/Ethnicity bias. The motivations behind a hate crime could stem from many factors such as race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity and so on. Sometimes the motivation could be a mix of these factors too. The FBI mandates to specify at least one bias motivation for each offence, up to a maximum of five biases. The data on the main drivers behind hate crime incidents show that race/ethnicity accounts for an average of 60% or 3/5 of the total incidents, followed by religion at 12%, and sexual orientation at 10%. In the past three years from 2020 to 2022, hate crimes driven by religion and sexual orientation rose from 11% to 18% and 10% to 17% respectively.