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Letter: Honest reporting needed to trust hate-crime data

This is in response to the article in last week's Daily Herald titled "A 'hateful act of vandalism.'" I don't condone any hate crime. Such an act serves no purpose and accomplishes nothing.

A couple of days ago, Chicago's ABC News affiliate reported on the same incident as your article. That Channel 7 report said there has been a "430% " increase in antisemitic incidents in Illinois from 2016 through 2021. Your own article reports a "record" 53 antisemitic incidents in 2021, a 15% increase from 2020 and a fourfold increase since 2016.

Where do these figures originate? The 430% figure is from an article that appears on the Chicago ADL website dated April 26, 2022. The percentage increase is so high because there were only 10 such incidents in 2016. Increases in small numbers always look large in percentage terms.

In fact, according to another article on the same website there were 68 such incidents in 2019, which is more than the "record" of 53 you report for 2021. Moreover, that September 2021 article also states that antisemitic hate crimes decreased by 17.6% from 2019 to 2020. With a further decrease to 53 in 2021, that means antisemitic hate crimes in Illinois have been decreasing since 2019, not trending upward. But the media never reports it that way.

Keep in mind that, according to the most recent online FBI statistics, nationally, in 2020 there were 869 anti-white hate crimes as opposed to 683 antisemitic hate crimes in the same year, as measured by bias. A similar relationship exists for 2016 and 2018. Yet, somehow, I never hear the media report about anti-white hate crimes.

If the media wants its reporting on hate crimes to be taken seriously, it needs to be honest with the numbers it reports.

Tom Paige

Naperville

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