WASHINGTON, December 8 (Sputnik) — The overwhelming majority of hate crimes in the United States are related to racial tensions, an FBI press release issued Monday reads.
“49.3 percent of [hate crime] victims were targeted because of the offenders’ racial bias,” the press release says referring to FBI’s recent Hate Crime Statistics, 2013 report.
In 2013 there was a total of 5,928 hate crime incidents involving 6,933 offenses “as being motivated by a bias toward a particular race, gender, gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity in 2013,” according to the release.
The second motive for hate crimes in the United States was stated as sexual-orientation bias accounting for 20.2 percent of cases, and the third motive being religious bias with 16.9 percent of hate victims targeted because of the religion they profess.
The FBI report indicates that the vast majority of hate crime offenders are white Americans.
“Of the 5,814 known offenders, 52.4 percent were white, and 24.3 percent were black or African American,” the press release reads.
Over the past two weeks the United States saw two waves of race-related protests. Riots flared in the US town of Ferguson, Missouri following the grand jury decision on November 24 not to indict a white police officer Darren Wilson for fatal shooting of 18-year-old African-American Michael Brown. Protests swept across 180 US cities of 38 different states and even spread to some other countries including the United Kingdom.
A new wave of protests erupted in New York City after last Wednesday’s grand jury decision not to bring charges against the white police officer Pantaleo, who killed the African-American Eric Garner in a chokehold in July.
