Law Against Hate Crimes

The first law against hate crimes was passed in 1968 as a civil rights act; the law was aimed at protecting people against any attacks based on race, religion or origin. A crime motivated by gender, disability and sexual preference could not be prosecuted as a hate crime until 2009.The FBI says that a hate crime can target either a person or property and can be motivated in whole or in part by biases, meaning offenders can have other motives besides hate. To track attacks such as these, the FBI now collects voluntary reports of hate crimes from local jurisdictions across the country. The FBI began reporting hate crime statistics since 1996. In 2015, there were 5,818 hate crime incidents reported, the majority of those were based on race and