ABSTRACT
Introduction Hate violence has a long history in the United States. However, some sources are suggesting that it has increased in the recent past. Accurately measuring the number of hate crimes committed is extremely di®cult, and it was only with the passage of the federal Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 that statistics were kept on this crime. In addition, two other factors contribute to the lack of meaningful statistics in this area: the lack of training by law enforcement, which causes many o®cers to fail to recognize incidents of racial violence, and the natural reluctance on the part of many victims of hate crimes to report such incidents to law enforcement agencies.
