Hate crimes are evil. Hate crime statistics, by contrast, can be whatever you want them to be.
It all depends on how you view the numbers, like the numbers in the FBI's latest report on hate crime incidents.
Reported incidents rose in the United States last year by almost 8 percent, the FBI reported. Also, for a second year, racial prejudice was the motive in slightly more than half of the reported instances.
In television appearances, the Rev. Al Sharpton, leader of the National Action Network, barely concealed his satisfaction. He has been criticized by fussbudgets like me for grandstanding the issue. He led a march last week in Washington to accuse the Justice Department of lax hate-crime enforcement. This week, thanks to the FBI, he had actual evidence to back up his long-held speculation that hate crimes are on the rise.
"The FBI report confirms what we have been saying for many months about the severe increase in hate crimes," said Mr. Sharpton.
Well, not quite. It's true that the FBI data confirm an increase in hate crimes in 2006, but not in a way that confirms what Sharpton and Co. have been saying.
For one thing, reported hate crimes spiked upward in 2001 and have since declined. For another, this year the number of reported attacks against blacks barely budged, according to the new data posted on the FBI's Web site. Although Mr. Sharpton has expressed greatest alarm over hate crimes against blacks, last year's increase in hate crimes came almost entirely as a result of an increase in reported attacks against whites. Reported attacks against blacks stayed relatively flat.
Incidents in which the victim was targeted for being white increased by 7.5 percent last year, while similar hate crimes against blacks increased by only - get out your calculators - four-tenths of 1 percent.
Not that I want to give you the impression that a surging race war is being waged against whites. After all, it is sobering to remember that the reported 3,332 black hate-crime victims numbered three times higher than the reported 1,054 white victims.
Yet, the qualifying adjective "reported" is important. The reporting of hate crime statistics by local police departments to the FBI is voluntary. That always feeds the suspicion that some departments might be shaving their figures a bit, just to make their communities look more hospitable.
