The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) welcomed news of a 6% drop in reported hate crimes in 2011 in the US, as the FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics Act Report found the lowest number of hate crimes were reported in the US last year since 1994.

The FBI has collated data on hate crimes annually since 1990.

Acknowledging the progress, however, ADL’s National Director Abraham Foxman highlighted the evidence of disproportionately high rates of attacks against Jewish targets, a trend he called “troubling”, as he cautioned it proved “once again, that anti-Semitism is still a serious and deeply entrenched problem in America”.

The FBI report revealed 63% of all religion-based hate crimes in 2011 targeted Jewish individuals or institutions.

Despite the all-time low number of reported crimes standing at 6,222, Foxman reiterated that this constituted a rate of one crime every 90 minutes each day, a he called on “law enforcement and community leaders t make greater efforts to raise awareness of hate crimes and their impact on society”.

Foxman also cast doubt on the accuracy of the available data, as he revealed that 79 cities with populations in excess of 100,000 people had failed to contribute statistics on local hate crimes to the FBI report, a decrease of 500 participating police departments on the previous year, as he insisted “law enforcement agencies must demonstrate that they are ready and willing to respond to hate violence”.

Describing hate crimes as a “national problem”, Foxman vowed to “continue to lead national and state advocacy, training and legal efforts to improve the response to hate violence”.

(Source: EJP)