The Hate Index represents a journalistic effort to chronicle hate crimes and other acts of intolerance since the Nov. 8, 2016 presidential election victory of Republicans Donald Trump and Mike Pence over Democrats Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine.
The idea is to tally as many verifiable incidents as possible, and create an easily searchable data base that lets users slice and dice the data points (e.g. location, type of incident, etc.) in various ways.
The Hate Index is a faculty-led product of the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism's NYCity News Service. Our volunteer crew consists primarily of students, staff and faculty members.
Our team is scouring news accounts of verbal, physical and other kinds of attacks victimizing everyone from minority group members in the U.S. – among them Muslims, Latinos, African Americans and immigrants as well as the LGBT community – to Trump supporters.
We’re going through the incidents, one by one, and breaking them into multiple, often overlapping, categories based on available details.
We are including incidents that come from what we deem legitimate news organizations that performed due diligence in reporting the story (interviewing accusers, witnesses, investigative authorities, etc) and/or can be backed by official sources/documents (e.g. police reports, court documents, etc).
With the launch of the site, we're also collecting accounts from the public (go here to contribute). Any incidents submitted will be vetted by our team.
Our data collection system is not automated – at least not at this point. Anything that doesn’t pass our journalistic smell test won’t make onto The Index. We’ll be as transparent as possible as we go along.
Our standards for inclusion may differ from other entities, like the Southern Law Poverty Center. For example: While we’re including cyber bullying incidents and threats aimed at specific people, we’re not tracking more general online declarations of hate.
Also, at this point, we are not soliciting reports from the general public and are relying primarily on news accounts, and, to a lesser extent, social media-driven reports. Keep checking back with us for updated numbers and details.
Amid rising reports of scrawled swastikas, chants of "Build the wall!," hijab-grabbing and other threatening behavior, we hope to add to the public accounting of hatred-in-action.
We’re determined to offer, as best we can, a sense of scope, context and insight as we attempt to track to the toll of intolerance during a period like no other in U.S. history.
It’s also our hope that local media and law enforcement will use The Hate Index to more fully spotlight and investigate incidents that otherwise may have been garnered little attention.
Sandeep Junnarkar and Jere Hester
Barbara Gray
Sarah Matusek, Paula Moura
Kazi Awal, Monica Cordero, Ryan Kelley, Sarah Kerr, William Mathis, Mallory Moench, Nour Saudi and Milana Vinn