On December 12, 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program released 2021 statistics about bias-motivated incidents throughout the nation. The 2021 data, submitted by 11,834 law enforcement agencies, provide information about the offenses, victims, offenders, and locations of hate crimes. This is the first year the annual hate crimes statistics were reported entirely through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Compared with the previous crime data collection system, NIBRS collects significantly more detailed data for each individual criminal incident. Law enforcement agencies submitted incident reports involving 7,262 criminal incidents and 8,673 related offenses as being motivated by bias toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity. Highlights of Hate Crime Statistics, 2021, follow. 

Published by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Brennan Center for Justice, this report discusses current domestic terrorism prevention policies. Aside from questioning the effectiveness of the current U.S. domestic terrorism prevention strategy, this report raises concerns over the ethics of certain policies. Issues of concern include the continued utilization of “discredited countering violent extremism programs” and “flawed surveillance and information sharing practices.” In addition to these issues, key terms such as “violent extremism” are not clearly defined in the same manner across all agencies, despite the fact that these terms can be used as justification for surveillance and the implementation of other terrorism-prevention methods. While parts of the current strategy remain problematic, some improvements have been made via the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. According to the report, this strategy strengthens the “tracking of domestic terrorism cases” and emphasizes the need to prioritize investigations of violent white supremacists. These strides towards a more comprehensive domestic terrorism prevention plan have, unfortunately, not resolved bias targeting in investigative practices, nor have they eliminated the implementation of unnecessary and ineffective techniques.

Hosted by the National Institute of Justice, this podcast discusses human trafficking as an issue without a simple solution. Research on human trafficking is helping victims and developing tools and information to help better understand, prevent, and respond to trafficking. NIJ scientist Mary Carlton joins host Josh Mondoro, communications assistant at NIJ, for a discussion about this research.

Hosted by the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) and funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, this webinar will discuss how video surveillance is used in most investigations. Attendees will learn about video surveillance technology and how we perceive recorded images. We will discuss best practices in properly obtaining video surveillance and various types of recorders to obtain the best-quality videos. Another topic will be the proper handling of digital multimedia evidence, which will increase the likelihood of court admissibility in criminal and civil cases. We will highlight forensic video enhancement software and LPR technology that can be used to clarify videos and images.

When: Thursday, January 26, 2023
Time: 12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., E

Published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), this report discusses the data regarding female victims of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter. Of the estimated 4,970 female victims of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2021, data reported by law enforcement agencies indicate that 34 percent were killed by an intimate partner. By comparison, about 6 percent of the 17,970 males murdered that year were victims of intimate partner homicide. Overall, 76 percent of female murders and 56 percent of male murders were perpetrated by someone known to the victim. About 16 percent of female murder victims were killed by a nonintimate family member—parent, grandparent, sibling, in-law, or other family member—compared with 10 percent of male murder victims. A larger percentage of males (21 percent) were murdered by a stranger than were females (12 percent). For one out of every three male murder victims and one out of every five female murder victims, the relationship between the victim and the offender was unknown.