The number of hate crimes reported to police in the nation’s largest cities fell slightly in 2024 – an unprecedented and unexpected decline in an election year when experts predicted such crimes would rise, according to preliminary data from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University shared first with USA TODAY.
At least 3,268 hate crimes were reported across 42 major cities including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Portland, Ore., Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia last year, a decrease of about 2.7% from the record high hit in 2023, the data shows. The report found the 10 most populous cities saw an even larger decline, but anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim incidents continued to rise amid the Israel-Hamas war.
“This is the first time since modern record keeping started in ’91 nationally, that an election year was down, but we had an unusual increase the year before, because of an unexpected international conflict,” said Brian Levin, professor emeritus at the university and founder of the center.
Why did hate crimes decline?
Hate crimes have been on the rise in the United States over the past decade, Levin said, and he and other experts previously warned they would likely continue to rise in 2024.
But unlike in 2016 when there was an “explosion” of hate crimes in the month of the election, some major cities saw a “significant decline” in hate crimes in the last months of 2024, Levin said. Levin said this could have happened because some people felt emboldened to express their bigotry in ways that wouldn’t constitute a crime, particularly as social media platforms loosened curbs on hate speech.
“I think a lot of people were expressing their prejudice in other ways, at rallies or online, and venting their frustrations,” Levin said.
At a campaign event in October for President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, attendees waved placards emblazoned with a slogan that is also used by a notorious white supremacist group.
Levin said it’s not clear the decline will persist. The number of people killed by extremists in America in 2025 has already exceed last year’s death toll and is expected to rise even higher, according to data provided exclusively to USA TODAY by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism last month.
“It’s not that crisis has declined … this may be a coiled spring, where the prejudicial stereotypes that are now so widely circulated, one of them is going to spark something,” Levin said.
Anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim hate crimes continue to rise
The Pew Research Center identifies 5.8 million adults (2.4% of all U.S. adults) as Jewish.
Anti-Muslim hate crimes increased 18% across 28 cities, while hate crimes against Jews rose by about 11% in 35 cities and are projected to reach another consecutive record, according to Levin’s data. This data reflects trends observed by advocacy organizations for both groups.
In the year following the deadly October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas militants, the Anti-Defamation League recorded more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the United States, a spike partially due to a change in the advocacy organization’s definition of such incidents. The uptick in antisemitism will be the subject of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday.
In the first half of 2024, the Council on American-Islamic Relations documented 4,951 complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian hate, a 69% increase over the same period the year prior. CAIR’s latest report is expected this month and a spokesperson for the group said 2024’s complaints are projected to surpass those received in 2023.
One year later: Anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate incidents spike since Oct. 7 attacks
Crimes against Asians decline, but hate on the rise
After a dramatic rise amid the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian hate crimes declined by more than 14% last year in 29 cities, according to Levin’s data. But anti-Asian slurs and threats of violence in domestic extremist spaces online rose dramatically after President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, advocacy organization Stop AAPI Hate found.
The organization said in a report released last month the surges coincided with anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric from Trump and his allies, citing spikes in December when Trump, billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy sparked a public dispute over the H-1B visa program and in January amid scrutiny of Chinese-owned companies including TikTok and DeepSeek AI.
What’s happening online often corresponds with hate incidents in the real world and their data can shed light on gaps in official data that result from underreporting and the challenges of prosecuting hate, Stop AAPI Hate’s co-founder, Manjusha Kulkarni, said.
“Most law enforcement agencies only collect hate crime specific data, and while that is valuable to tell us what criminal acts are happening, our own data at Stop AAPI hate has shown that a vast majority of hate incidents or hate acts are not crimes at all … I don’t think we have a full understanding of what it is our community members are experiencing,” she said.
Hate crime data flawed
The FBI defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias(es) against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” Law enforcement agencies reported more than 12,000 hate crimes to the bureau in 2023, according to the bureau’s most recent data.
But it’s not mandatory for all of the country’s more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies to submit data to the federal government and national data on these crimes is notoriously flawed.
“There’s difficulty along every step of the reporting chain, from victims not reporting at all to victims reporting, but it’s not necessarily being labeled as a potential hate crime,” Levin said.
A view shows a sign on J. Edgar Hoover FBI building in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 17, 2022. REUTERS/Leah Millis
Levin added that if a law enforcement agency is in the process of changing the way it tracks these crimes, they may not have a full year’s worth of data to send to the FBI before its annual report is released.
Although the latest FBI data has been updated since it was first released in September, Levin said it still appears to be missing hundreds of victims from California. The number of hate crime victims attributed to the Los Angeles Police Department by state and county officials don’t appear to match either, he said.
When asked about the discrepancies, a spokesperson for the FBI said its data represents information submitted by the state of California for the LAPD and directed questions to the department.
“What a specific police department defines as a hate crime may be different than that of the FBI’s UCR Program. This leaves the potential for a difference in results between the local standard and the national standard used to ensure uniformity in reporting statistics across the nation,” the FBI statement said.
USA TODAY has reached out to the LAPD, the state attorney general’s office, and the LA County Commission on Human Relations for comment. Levin acknowledged his data isn’t complete either, but said the snapshot his reports capture help illustrate broader, troubling trends seen across the country.
“Even with declines, we are hovering either at, slightly above or off records, and are historically elevated because this has been a bad decade,” he said.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hate crimes in major US cities unexpectedly declined in 2024
