Publication of full 2020 dataset follows Attorney General’s Office, NJ State Police announcing top line statistics last week

TRENTON – Following the release last week of top line, preliminary data regarding bias incidents in New Jersey in 2020, the Attorney General’s Office and the New Jersey State Police today published the complete dataset cataloguing 2020 bias incidents in the state. The data, which remains preliminary, is available online in spreadsheet format on the State Police website.

The complete dataset includes a breakdown of bias incidents by type of offense, victim, and location, and includes municipal-level data, among other information. The 2020 Bias Incident Report, which will be published later this year, will include further analysis of the data.

While releasing the top line data last week, Attorney General Grewal also announced that the Attorney General’s Office and the State Police will soon begin making bias incident data available to the public on a monthly basis, starting in April. These monthly bias incident reports will show breakdowns by bias type and county.

Members of the public are encouraged to report bias incidents to their local police departments, or via the NJBIAS online portal at https://bias.njcivilrights.gov, or by calling 800-277-BIAS.

For purposes of UCR reporting, a “bias incident” is a suspected or confirmed violation of New Jersey’s bias intimidation statute, N.J.S.A. 2C:16-1(a)(1) or (2), in which a victim is subjected to harassment, assault, terroristic threats, or other specified acts “because of race, color, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, or ethnicity.”

Because the data captures only reported bias incidents, it is under-inclusive in that it does not capture incidents that were never reported to law enforcement. According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, over half of the victims of hate crimes in the U.S. from 2011 to 2015 did not report them.

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