Incidents of hate crimes have been on the rise in the United States- including vandalism, intimidation, assault and murder. Federal officials have recorded the highest number of hatemotivated killings in recent years. Those who commit such heinous crimes have different motivations; sometimes they are motivated by religious discrimination, sometimes racial discrimination and sometimes from their hatred against people of different sexual orientations.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been collecting data related to hate crimes since the 1990s. In this project, we will be utilizing their datasets which is publicly accessible here. Specifically, we will be using data related to the number of hate crime offenses distributed by the known offender’s race, ethnicity, and bias motivation. The other dataset presents state-wise data of hate crime incidents distributed by bias motivation. We collected 5 years of data (from 2013- 2017) and compiled it into one dataset. Moreover, we have also used the dataset for global terrorism which can be found here. This dataset contains information on terrorist attacks around the world from 1970 through 2017, including systematic data on domestic as well as international terrorist incidents. We have also used the dataset of the results for US elections 2016 which can be found here. This dataset contains the total number of votes all presidential candidates received in general elections 2016 in every county of the United States.
For this project, we came up with the following analytical questions that can be used to study the growing number of hate crimes in recent years:
- How have hate crimes changed in the span of 2013-2017. More specifically, have hate crimes against Muslims increased in last 5 years in the USA? And if so then who are the offenders i.e. what race do the offenders belong to generally?
- Is there a correlation between hate crimes committed against minorities and republican voters? -correlation between the cities/states from where Donald Trump received the most votes in the 2016 general elections and where a high number of hate crimes were committed from 2013-2016? Have hate crimes increased after Trump came to power?
- Is there a correlation between terrorist activities i.e. terrorist activities committed by militant Jihadi Terrorist organizations and hate crimes against Muslims in the United States from 2013-2017?
United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. (November 2017). Hate Crime Statistics, 2016. Retrieved (2.12.20), from (https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime). National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2015- 2018). Global Terrorism Database [More than 180,000 terrorist attacks worldwide, 1970-2017]. University of Maryland. https://www.kaggle.com/START-UMD/gtd Aaron Hoffman. (2016). US-general-election-2016 [United States General Election 2016 Results by County]. New York Times. https://data.world/aaronhoffman/us-general-election-2016 Ekins, E., 2017. The Five Types Of Trump Voters. [online] Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. Available at: https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/the-five-types-trump-voters#sharecontent [Accessed 2 December 2020].