Chicago: According to representatives of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a recently implemented FBI system intended to enhance the monitoring and recording of hate crimes is "not complete" and is still being developed. They claimed that as a result, the most recent statistics gathered from it are "unreliable."

Since 1991, the FBI has been gathering information from the states and keeping track of instances of hate crimes. According to Chris Habiby, the ADC's director of government affairs and advocacy, the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which was introduced in 2021, would make it simpler to consistently log hate crimes and give a clearer and more accurate picture of the issue nationwide.

He added that the most recent FBI statistics are in doubt because law enforcement agencies in several significant jurisdictions in states with sizable Arab American populations have not yet begun using NIBRS and an estimated 56 percent of hate crimes are not reported to authorities at all.

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The report on hate crimes for this year is unfinished and unreliable, so Habiby argued that we shouldn't compare it to earlier reports.

"In the years to come, our collective focus must be on supporting every community that has been the target of hate violence and working to ensure thorough and accurate reporting. Additionally, we must work to mandate that all law enforcement agencies in the nation report hate crimes.

7,303 hate crime incidents were reported in 2021, the FBI report states. Out of those, Black people were the target of the most incidents (2,233) based on race, ethnicity, or ancestry. The highest number of anti-religious incidents was 324 anti-Jewish incidents.

The report lists 96 incidents that target Muslims and 75 incidents that are anti-Arab, but according to Habiby, these numbers are much lower than they should be.

The issue at hand, he said, is that a sizable number of agencies are not yet NIBRS-compliant, so their data was left out of the report that was made public.

A third of the nation's more than 18,000 law enforcement organisations failed to file any reports (to the new system).

We are essentially discussing the absence of data from the entire states of Florida and California. Although we are aware that there are a sizable number of hate crimes that take place in New York City, Chicago, and Phoenix, there was no data reported for those cities.

They haven't transferred their data into NIBRS, and the FBI intentionally left their data out of the report that was made public in order to maintain consistency. It illustrates how unreliable the report is this year.

In the first place, Habiby continued, there is a general underreporting of hate crimes to law enforcement, which exacerbates the issue.

The number we see is already going to be lower than what actually happened, he said, because the Department of Justice estimates that 56% of all hate crimes go unreported.

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According to the Arab American Institute, only 10 states—California, Michigan, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—are home to nearly two-thirds of all Arabs in the US.

Habiby said the ADC believes that when all states and jurisdictions update their procedures and start entering all of their data into NIBRS, it will provide a more accurate picture of the extent of hate crimes not only against Arabs and Muslims in the US, but also against all communities. This is despite the problems surrounding the delays among law enforcement agencies in integrating with the new FBI system, Habiby said.

He continued by saying that the ADC was working on compiling its own statistics and urged Arab and Muslim Americans to report any hate crimes to the group in addition to the police.

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"The Arab and Muslim communities continue to be targeted by those who hold anti-Arab, racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic views," said ADC National Executive Director Abed Ayoub. ADC has started working to improve and broaden the community infrastructure on a national scale in order to accurately track and report anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes and incidents across the country.