The 2016 election left many in America afraid – of intolerance and the violence it can inspire. The need for trustworthy facts on the details and frequency of hate crimes and other incidents born of prejudice has never been more urgent.

There is simply no reliable national data on hate crimes. And no government agency documents lower-level incidents of harassment and intimidation, such as online or real-life bullying. Understanding and documenting incidents like these – from hate-inspired murders to anti-Semitic graffiti to racist online trolling – requires new approaches.

That's why we marshaled a national coalition of news organizations intent on reporting the nature and scope of hate crimes and bias incidents in the United States.

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. See our full list of media partners here. Documenting Hate also obtained data from civil-rights groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, and published a searchable database of news articles about hate crimes created by Google News Lab.

You can see what we produced during the project on Facebook and Twitter. We used these accounts to share good journalism about hate crimes and to let the public know what the partners in our project learned along the way.