The New York Times obtained an advanced copy of a study by researchers at Cal State San Berdoo on the prevalence of hate crimes in the United States.

While the most current hate crime statistics from the F.B.I. are not expected until November, new data from researchers at California State University, San Bernardino, found that hate crimes against American Muslims were up 78 percent over the course of 2015. Attacks on those perceived as Arab rose even more sharply.

Police and news media reports in recent months have indicated a continued flow of attacks, often against victims wearing traditional Muslim garb or seen as Middle Eastern.

Some scholars believe that the violent backlash against American Muslims is driven not only by the string of terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States that began early last year, but also by the political vitriol from candidates like Donald J. Trump, who has called for a ban on immigration by Muslims and a national registry of Muslims in the United States.

We’re seeing these stereotypes and derogative statements become part of the political discourse. The bottom line is we’re talking about a significant increase in these types of hate crimes.

--Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the San Bernardino campus

The latest major episode of anti-Muslim violence came last weekend, when an arsonist on a motorcycle started a fire that engulfed the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce, Fla., where Omar Mateen — the gunman in the June massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando — had sometimes prayed.

Buried in the 14th paragraph of the Times report, we have:

The rise came even as hate crimes against almost all other groups — including blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays and whites — either declined or increased only slightly, his study found. One exception was hate crimes against transgender people, which rose about 40 percent.

One may possibly lay that increase at the feet of state legislators' attempts to legalize discrimination against transgender people and the various campaigns to paint transgender people as sexual predators.

According to the FBI anti-gay male attacks were 599 or 10.9% of total hate crime incidents in 2014. All anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual and related hate crime, however, totaled 999 or 18% of all hate crimes. Gender identity and the transgender subcategories had 196 incidents in 2014. Our study showed a decline of 4.45% in LGB attacks in the states sampled as incidents dropped from 629 to 601, but there was a 40% increase in attacks related to gender non-conformity and transgender. A 2013 study found that 2.3% of adults surveyed stated that they were gay, lesbian or bisexual, 2.2% of men and 2.4% of women.
At about two percent of the population and over 18% of hate crime, the LGBT community appears to be the most disproportionately targeted community of those tracked by the FBI. Homeless advocates, contend that their community, may be the most disproportionately targeted for bias attacks, but that category, while recognized by various states, is not by the FBI in their hate crime data collection.

--the study

While the nation was horrified at the massacre of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, less well known are killings of transgender people across the nation. This worrisome string of homicides, often not captured in police hate crime reports, and thus absent from ours, involves transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs enumerated 24 hate violence homicides in 2014, but the paucity of details known about some of these killings make the exact number of bias homicides against them elusive, but still nonetheless very troubling.

--the study

Differing Standards Exist For Communities, Investigators and Prosecutors

There were at least 14 officially designated hate homicides in 2015, which would tie 2003 levels and be the highest since 2000. However, as seen herein, as with hate crime reported to police generally, this is clearly an undercount. While to a far lesser degree, there have also been instances where commentators and groups have clearly misattributed bias motives to crimes, including homicides; when evidence was inconclusive or the crime was apparently committed for other reasons. The June 2015 racially motivated murders of nine African-American parishioners at Charleston South Carolina’s Mother Emmanuel church by a lone white supremacist, is in our list of homicides, however, because of its significant statistical relevance to the annual homicide sample, and because the U.S. Department of Justice is independently prosecuting the case as a hate crime under federal law.

--the study