9511: Hate Crime Report.

From The New York Daily News…

Anti-Latino hate crime surges in 2010; 66.6% of ethnic-bias victims were of Hispanic origin versus 45% in 2009

The alarming stat is the highest in a decade

By Amanda Mikelberg, New York Daily News

Hate crimes targeting Hispanics accounted for 66.6% of all ethnically motivated bias incidents in 2010, according to the FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics report released Monday. The remaining 33.4% consists of all incidents targeting other ethnic and national groups combined.

That’s an eleven percentage point spike from the 2009 report that showed Hispanics accounting for nearly 45% of hate crimes based on ethnicity or national origin.

The statistic reflects the highest percentage of victims “targeted because of an anti-Hispanic bias” in nearly a decade, whereas ethnically motivated hate crimes have generally fallen since 2007 and remained the nearly the same since 2009, the report indicates.

There were 747 Hispanic victims of a total 1,122 under the ethnic/national category, which does not include victims of racial, religious or sexual orientation biases. The stat does include crimes committed by Latino groups against Latino groups.

The reason for alarming surge in anti-Latino hate crimes remains undefined, but has been attributed to the significant population growth of Hispanics in every state and nearly every county in America in 2010.

However, Hispanics were not the most victimized demographic in 2010. There were 3,949 victims of racially motivated hate crimes in 2010, of which 2,764, or 70%, were African-Americans. And of the 1,552 victims of religious based hate, 1,040, or 67%, were Jewish.