The FBI produces a comprehensive list of hate crimes each year. It breaks down the hate crime both by victim as well as perpetrator, and an examination of the data can yield important findings about trends in certain groups as victims and as offenders.

The numbers change each year but typically within a natural band. If the data suddenly jumps by an unusual amount, it would suggest that a terrible spike (or fortunate decline) has happened for some reason, or that the data is bad.

In reviewing the 2020 data for hate crimes, a huge jump in the number of crimes against the LGBT community seems to have occurred (+57% from 2019). Digging through the numbers further shows that the spike relates to crimes against lesbians (+619%) while crimes against gays declined by 11%. The jump in the numbers was completely attributable to anti-lesbian attacks by White people (+1465%, jumping from 142 attacks to 1,021), while anti-lesbian attacks by Black attackers fell 11%.

Is it possible that anti-lesbian attacks by White people which had annual totals of between 51 and 94 between 2004 and 2019 suddenly spiked in 2020 to 939 the way that the FBI numbers state? It seems highly unlikely to have happened in the same year that anti-gay and anti-lesbian attacks by Black people both declined by 11%.

The FBI is an important source of information about hate crimes, but it loses credibility when it fails to flag and revisit an errant data point, such as its statistic about White people attacking lesbians in 2020. Hopefully the FBI will check its data and either correct it or explain why such a big change happened.