By John Mack Freenan
The FBI released the latest edition of the Hate Crime Statistics report this week. Among its other findings, they found that 20.8 percent of reported hate crimes were motivated by sexual orientation and .5 percent was motivated by gender identity. The 5,928 reported crimes were down from 6,573 in 2012. These statistics have to be taken with a grain of salt as they only apply to reported hate crimes. This is the first year that crimes based on gender and gender identity were specifically tracked as hate crimes.
