Hate crime in Massachusetts

What this data cannot show

• Reporting is voluntary. An agency that submitted nothing is indistinguishable here from one that had nothing to submit, so a zero is not an absence of hate crime and a rise is not necessarily a rise in incidents.
• These are counts, not rates. Dividing by population would present differences in reporting as differences in incidence, and the FBI publishes no participation share for this collection that would let us say by how much two states differ.
• An incident recorded with more than one bias is counted once, under "Multiple Bias", rather than under each. That is what lets the biases sum to the total.
• Incidents, offenses and locations count different things. The same incidents produced more offenses than incidents, because one incident can carry several.
• An incident is as the reporting agency classified it at the time. It is not a charge, a prosecution or a conviction.
• Massachusetts is ranked against other states on the count alone. A state where most agencies participate and one where few do are not comparable, and the FBI publishes nothing that would let us say by how much they differ.
• Biases against which Massachusetts recorded no incident are not listed. That is an absence in the reporting, which is not the same as an absence of hate crime.