Hate-crime figures rise in '03; blacks often targeted, FBI says

WASHINGTON -- More than 7,400 hate crimes were reported nationwide last year, with more than half of them attributed to racial prejudice and most of that prejudice directed against blacks, the FBI said yesterday.

Reported hate crimes motivated by antiblack racial bias totaled 2,548 in 2003, more than double such crimes against all other racial groups combined. There were 3,150 black victims in these cases, including four who were murdered, according to the annual FBI report.

The overall total of 7,489 hate crime incidents reported in 2003 was slightly above the number reported in 2002. Nearly two-thirds of the crimes involved in such cases were intimidation, vandalism, or property destruction.

But there were also hundreds of violent crimes, including 14 murders. There were more than 2,700 assaults, 444 bias-related robberies, burglaries, and thefts, and 34 arson fires.

The report shows that crimes categorized as anti-Islamic remained at about the same level in 2003 -- 149 crimes -- as the year before. There had been a spike in such crimes immediately after the 2001 terror attacks, helping drive the overall hate crime number much higher that year.

By far the most hate crimes based on religion were directed at Jews, with 927 incidents in 2003, about the same as in 2002.

The report also found more than 1,200 hate crimes based on sexual orientation, including 783 against male homosexuals. That included six murders.

The FBI hate crimes report is drawn from information submitted by more than 11,900 law enforcement agencies around the country. Only about 16 percent of those agencies reported any hate crimes in their jurisdictions during 2003.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, yesterday defended its record of prosecuting criminal civil rights cases after an independent study concluded the number of prosecutions had dropped significantly under President Bush.

The analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that the number of criminal civil rights defendants prosecuted had dropped from 159 in 1999 to 84 last year.

After initially declining comment on the study, the Justice Department said yesterday the research was ''incorrect" and the actual number of defendants prosecuted last year was 151, more than the 138 it said were prosecuted in 1999.

''This administration believes in and has vigorously enforced the criminal civil rights laws," said Justice Department spokesman Eric Holland.

David Burnham, a coauthor of the study at TRAC, said the research was based on numbers provided under Freedom of Information Act requests by the Executive Office of US Attorneys, a part of the Justice Department.

The same information, Burnham said, is used in the department's reports to Congress and to investigative agencies such as the Government Accountability Office. It was backed up, he said, by similar downward trends in civil rights enforcement that TRAC found in records kept by federal courts.