Number of U.S. hate crimes rises slightly in 2008: FBI

More than half of hate crimes committed in the United States were racially motivated and three-quarters of the victims of those attacks were black, the FBI's annual report on hate crimes said.

Of the 6,927 known perpetrators of all hate crimes ─ which include attacks driven by not only racial bias but also by the victims' religious affiliation, sexual orientation, ethnic origins or disability ─ 61 percent were white. Blacks perpetrated attacks in around 20 percent of cases.

The report comes weeks after President Barack Obama, the first black U.S. president, signed into law the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which beefed up existing legislation by adding attacks fueled by biases against sexual orientation, gender identity and disability to the list of offenses that constitute hate crimes.

The new law was named after two men killed in separate hate crimes. Shepard, 21, died in October 1988 after being beaten by two men because he was gay, while Byrd, 49, was killed in June 1998 by three men in Texas who dragged him behind their truck. He was African-American.

In 2008, around 17 percent of hate crime victims were attacked because of their sexual orientation. The overwhelming majority, 96 percent, were gay or lesbian, the FBI report said.

Nearly 20 percent were attacked for their religious affiliation, with Jews making up around two-thirds of the victims of those crimes.

Muslims were the targets of less than eight percent of religious hate crimes, putting them in third place behind Jews and followers of unspecified “other religions” attacked in 13 percent of religion-fueled hate crimes.

In 2007, Muslims represented about eight percent of victims attacked because of their religion, and in 2006 they made up 12 percent of victims of religion-motivated hate crimes.

Members of the large U.S. Hispanic community were victims in 64 percent, or nearly two-thirds, of the 1,148 hate crimes driven by a bias against a person's ethnicity or national origin.

Most hate crimes targeting individuals were intimidation or simple assault, but seven murders and 11 rapes were counted among the hate crime statistics.

The FBI compiled the report using data submitted by 13,690 law enforcement agencies in most of the 50 states. More than 80 percent of the participating agencies reported no hate crimes in their jurisdictions in 2008.

The report, which has been compiled since 1992, is not intended to track a trend in hate crimes as the number of law enforcement agencies around the country that submit data for it varies from year to year, the FBI said.

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