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This Interactive Map Tracks White Supremacist Hate Crimes in America

The Anti-Defamation League documented and mapped 4,500 hate-related incidents.
Image: Anti-Defamation League

A year after Charlottesville, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has released an interactive map of hate-driven violence in the US documenting upwards of 4,500 incidents and activities.

The result is one organization’s look at a countrywide issue—the US has seen an uptick in race-related crimes in all of its major cities, up 12.5 percent in 2017, according to a California State University report. The majority of these hate crimes are anti-Black and anti-Semitic, according to that study, but vary widely depending on the city.

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“There’s a sense of urgency, a rising number of hate incidents,” said Oren Segal, director of the Center on Extremism.

The team at the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish non-profit organization that has historically spoken out against Anti-Semitism, has been compiling data on anti-Semitic crimes for years. For the map, the team separated its proprietary data into categories including extremist murders, anti-Semitic incidents, and white supremacist events.

The incidents range from the white supremacist group Identity Evropa handing out fliers, to terrorist/plot attacks, such as the case of Taylor Michael Wilson, a white supremacist in Nebraska who carried a loaded gun onto an Amtrak before he was found and arrested.

The incidents are spread throughout the country, though more prevalent in heavily populated areas on each coast. New York City, for example, had 102 anti-Semitic incidents, compared to Miami, which had seven. Segal said the data reflects not only the density of the areas, but those dealing with more extremist activity, such as Texas and Indiana.

But tracking the hate crimes is not always straightforward. “Sometimes it’s hard to make a decision between anti-government extremism and white supremacy; sometimes these ideologies overlap,” Segal said.

The map builds on a compendium of tracking race crime across the country—important to view collectively since some organizations have been criticized for including their own agenda. This includes the Anti-Defamation League, which has been accused of anti-Muslim rhetoric by some far left groups.

Other organizations documenting hate-driven violence include ProPublica in its Documenting Hate project, the Southern Poverty Law Center with Hatewatch, a platform that tracks and analyzes radical right activities, and Muslim Advocates, with a map of hate-related incidents reflecting the Islamophobia that has been rampant since the election.