A Jewish watchdog group is calling on Congress to investigate the FBI's reporting on antisemitic hate crimes after the federal agency's latest report claimed such incidents are declining.
"At a time of record antisemitic hate crimes, it is appalling that the FBI's data-gathering has been so badly botched," said Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, reports The Washington Free Beacon.
"This massive failure has undermined the purposes of hate crimes data precisely when we most need the data. If the FBI doesn't quickly correct this problem, congressional committees will need to ask some serious questions."
The FBI's 2021 findings, released in its latest annual report, showed a decline in violence against Jews. However, watchdog groups say such crimes have hit their highest levels in history in the past two years.
Part of the issue is that the 2021 report lacked information from multiple agencies across the U.S. Many locations did not turn in hate crime information in time to make it in the FBI's latest report.
"Law enforcement agency participation in submitting all crime statistics, including hate crimes, fell significantly from 2020 to 2021," an FBI spokesman said. "Several of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies, as well as some states, did not make the transition to [the new system] in time to submit data before the reporting deadline, and are not included in the 2021 reported totals."
This makes the FBI's statistics "essentially useless," Marcus said.
The Anti-Defamation League, meanwhile, reported that the highest levels of antisemitic violence took place in 2021.
A separate report, from the Jewish advocacy group AMCHA Initiative, found that assaults on Jewish students and their identities doubled in the 2021 and 2022 academic years.
"It is hard to imagine that a failure of this scope would escape the notice of congressional oversight staff," Marcus, an attorney and former U.S. Commission on Civil Rights staff director, said.
"In my experience overseeing federal civil rights data collections, congressional committees have historically taken a keen interest in the completeness and accuracy of governmental information provided to the public. I am hopeful that the Department of Justice and FBI will clean up this mess on their own."
The Brandeis Center, while reviewing the FBI's reporting, learned that in 2020, more than 15,000 agencies provided data on hate crimes, compared to 11,883 agencies in 2021, a drop of 20%, creating the impression that anti-Jewish crime had dropped.
"The problem is so bad that record-high levels of antisemitism appear in the official data as actual declines because major jurisdictions didn’t formally report it," Marcus said.
Some agencies omitting data from the report are from areas with the highest numbers of Jews, including California, New York, New Jersey, and Florida.
For example, at least 198 hate crimes occurred in New York in 2021 but were not included in the report, and Los Angeles County had reported a rise in anti-Jewish crimes but was not included in the FBI's final report.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.