Several high-profile hate crimes have made headlines in 2009, confirming fears for some that bias attacks are on the rise. They include the April killing of three Pittsburgh policemen by a right-wing extremist and the shooting in June at the Holocaust Museum in Washington by an elderly white supremacist that left a security guard dead.

In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security released a report detailing concerns about a rise in right-wing extremism. In The New York Times columnist Charles Blow parses the figures and uses a graphic to illustrate the dependence of right-wing hate groups on recruits with military training.

Adelita Medina is executive director of Alianza, the National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence. She has said that advocates for women who have experienced domestic violence should take a woman’s faith into consideration when trying to help her.

Summer Hathout is a prosecutor in the Los Angeles district attorney’s office and co-founder of the Muslim Women’s League. She has written about misperceptions of domestic violence within the American Muslim community. Contact via the Muslim Women’s League.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is an umbrella organization of more than 200 smaller organizations that works to promote human rights throughout the U.S. Wade Henderson is president and CEO, and Nancy Zirkin is the group’s policy director.

An analysis of the statistics by Human Rights First shows that while the number of hate crimes remained steady from 2006 to 2007, the number of attacks targeting Hispanics and LGBT people rose. The FBI reports showed a 3.3 percent rise in anti-Hispanic hate crimes and a 5.5 percent rise in the number of hate crimes motivated […]

The FBI’s has an index of all hate crime statistics since 1995.

Franklin E. Zimring is William G. Simon Professor of Law and Wolfen Distinguished Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Law School. He specializes in issues of criminology, violence and family law.

Don Lindley is an assistant professor of criminology at Jesuit-run Regis University in Denver and was a member of the Denver Police Department for 33 years.