I’ve been to only one funeral at Chesed Shel Emeth, which is in University City, about 15 minutes from where I grew up. Data on hate crimes — against Jews and everyone else — is miserably incomplete and poorly tracked. We don’t know if the vandalism at Chesed Shel Emeth was technically a hate crime. That’s why our project, “Documenting Hate,” an attempt to create a reliable database of hate crimes and bias incidents, asks victims to submit their stories. When I read the submissions, it’s clear that defining “hate crimes” can be as elusive as reliable data tracking them.

Source: New York Times February 23, 2017 20:37 UTC