CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

When a non-European Hispanic is attacked for ethnic reasons the crime is recorded as an anti-Hispanic hate crime. The FBI hate crimes report for 1997 records 636 such offenses. However, when a non-European Hispanic commits a hate crime against a person of another race he is classified as a white offender. This is because the FBI's data collection method permits classification of offenders only as white, black, Asian, or American Indian. This explains why the FBI report records 214 incidents of "whites" committing offenses against whites. The vast majority of these offenders are probably Hispanics who have been classified as white. The total of 4,523 "white" offenders listed on this page includes a substantial but unknown number of Hispanics.

Classifying non-European Hispanics as whites inflates the number of hate crimes attributed to whites and gives the impression that non-European Hispanics commit no hate crimes at all. The reason for gathering hate crime information is to understand the nature of racial and ethnic relations. That understanding is clouded when members of an important population group are counted separately as victims but are lumped together with whites when they are perpetrators. This is a serious flaw in the FBI's data collection procedure and should be corrected.

The chart below lists 3,858 offenders of "Unknown Race." These are anonymous vandals and graffiti writers, whose race is genuinely not known. Known non-European Hispanic offenders are not included in this number but are added to the "white" figure.