An April 8, 2009, story in The Washington Post, “Some Link Economy With Spate Of Killings,” examines links between the recession and 57 killings in eight mass-murder crimes over the course of a single month last spring.

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.

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.

The Rev. James Martin is a Jesuit priest and editor at large at America magazine in New York. His books include Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter Into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion and Sensitivity. 

Caroline J. Simon is the John H. and Jeanne M. Jacobson Professor of Philosophy at Hope College in Holland, Mich. She specializes in the topics of virtue, moral knowledge and sexuality and wrote The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny & Imagination.

The Muslim Women’s League is a nonprofit organization that works to improve the status of women in the American Muslim community. Part of its mission is to create awareness about domestic violence within the American Muslim Community. It is based in Los Angeles.