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Protestors rally against hate and then presidential candidate Donald Trump.

(Patti Sapone | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

If you take the FBI's new hate crime statistics at face value, New Jersey is doing a remarkable job combating illegal bias.

FBI data shows hate crimes in New Jersey have fallen by more than half since 2006, to a low of 330 in 2015.

Then again, using the same data, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that the Garden State is woefully behind Mississippi, which eradicated hate in 2015, recording zero bias crimes.

The reality is that hate crime data in New Jersey and the United States is all but useless. Experts say police are poorly-educated on what constitutes a hate crime and the FBI says underreporting among law enforcement is rampant.

"There are jurisdictions that fail to report hate crime statistics. Other jurisdictions claim there were no hate crimes in their community--a fact that would be welcome if true," FBI Director James Comey said in a 2014 speech. "We must continue to impress upon our state and local counterparts in every jurisdiction the need to track and report hate crime. It is not something we can ignore or sweep under the rug."

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Despite this, neither the state of New Jersey nor the FBI has done anything to check the veracity of the reporting (or non-reporting) of hate crimes by local police agencies. While it is mandated for New Jersey police agencies to report bias crime data to the state and the state subsequently to the FBI, there is no penalty written into the law at the state or federal level for not doing so.

"This not something the police do not know. We know there is underreporting. We know this is occurring," said Frank Pezzella, a professor specializing in hate crimes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "It needs to be made a priority to change it. Right now it is not."

Capt. Brian Polite of the New Jersey State Police defended the agency's data collection, but confirmed it does not routinely check the accuracy of hate crime reports.

"The data compiled for the (Uniform Crime Report) comes from all law enforcement agencies in the state and represents the best data available," he said in a statement. " No system can ensure 100 percent reporting, but New Jersey has a comprehensive program in place."

As the number of hate crimes reported by New Jersey police jurisdictions fell each year from a high of 759 in 2006, so too did the number of participating agencies. In 2015, the FBI received reports from 123 law enforcement agencies in New Jersey -- less than a quarter of the 508 in the state.

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"When we studied this, we found a wide variation on what local authorities deemed a hate crime, which frequently had little to do with the statute," said Jim Mulvaney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former New York deputy commissioner of the Division of Human Rights.

According to state and federal data, ethnically diverse cities like Perth Amboy and Morristown have not investigated a hate crime in more than 10 years. Other towns, like Edison and Keansburg, recorded major drops in hate crimes that could easily be more associated more with changes in administration than any concerted police action -- it's impossible to know.

"Since the Hate Crime Statistics Act was passed in 1990, the number of police agencies participating in (FBI data collection) has grown from 2,000 to 18,000," said Pezzella. "Of those participating, about 90 percent report zero hate crimes each year -- I suspect Perth Amboy falls into that category. So the number of police agencies (reporting) has gone up dramatically, yet the number of hate crimes reported has remained relatively flat. It's completely counterintuitive."

And the most significant reported drop in hate crimes in the last decade, both in New Jersey and nationally, occurred in 2009 -- the year Barack Obama assumed office as president -- the year another federal agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, estimated that bias crimes spiked significantly in the United States.

That year, the Bureau of Justice estimated there were 284,620 hate crimes in the United States. The FBI reported just 6,600.

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"How do you have a 95 percent gap between reported hate crimes at the FBI and the (Bureau of Justice Statistics)?" said Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the San Bernardino campus of the California State University. "We know there is significant underreporting."

Levin said New Jersey is one of the best states in the country for reporting hate crime data, but within a system that is graded on a heavy curve.

"It's all very relative," Levin said. "If all 50 states reported like New Jersey, I'd quit my job. But if you look at the FBI data now, you'd think New Jersey was this bubbling cauldron of hate."

In New Jersey, the State Police have compiled data on hate crimes for nearly three decades, and were one of the earliest to do so. While auditing of standard criminal statistics (homicide, robbery, etc.) is routine, neither the state police nor the FBI audit police departments to review how they report on hate crimes.

Polite said if problems are identified during other reviews, they are corrected.

"If during the course of those audits, a crime is identified that appears to be for a bias reason, the UCR Unit instructs the agency as to their responsibility regarding the Attorney General's Executive order 1987-3 and provides guidance on completing the required bias incident form," Polite said.

Of the 385 law enforcement agencies in New Jersey that did not record a hate crime in 2015, 105 have not recorded one in at least a decade.

Pezzella said part of the issue stems from police having limited time and resources to make complicated decisions.

"If an officer shows up at a crime scene, that officer only has a few minutes decide if this is a hate-motivated behavior. And all but the most egregious hate-motivated behavior isn't so clear cut," he said. "If he does decide the crime is hate-motivated, now you're talking about a whole different world of paperwork."

Mulvaney said the FBI could easily change a culture of underreporting by conducting audits on hate crimes as it does for standard crime data, like homicides, rape and robbery.

"The FBI wields a pretty big stick," he said. "If you think about the amount of federal dollars that goes into local police departments, it's a lot. If the FBI was interested, the FBI could do a lot to make departments focus on this."

Underreporting extends beyond police departments, however. Of the more than 293,000 hate crimes the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated occurred in 2012 (the most recent data available), the agency said only about a third were likely reported.

"If your car or friend goes missing, you're likely going to let someone know," Levin said. "With hate crimes, not so much."

Fear of retaliation, of deportation for undocumented immigrants, a lack of trust in the police and a lack of understanding of what a hate crime is all play into why hate crimes aren't reported. Mulvaney said it's a complex problem.

"When I was in New York, we'd occasionally get a grant from the federal government and run an ad campaign urging people to report hate crimes. Every time we did, hate crime reports would go up. When it finished, they'd go back down," he said. "Does that mean hate crimes went up? No. But it shows you what we're missing."

Both Levin and Mulvaney said absent any sea change in how hate crimes are tracked and accounted for by police, statistics kept in New Jersey or anywhere else will have little value -- at a time when they are perhaps most needed than anytime in recent memory.

"When Jack Maple created CompStat to track crimes, he said 'put dots on the map where crimes happen and put cops where the dots are'," Mulvaney said, referring to the New York Police Department's accountability system, which uses data to implement targeted policing. "If you don't know where the dots for hate crimes are, how can you address it?"

The campaign leading to the election of Donald J. Trump as president catapulted racial, gender, religious and class tensions into the forefront of the national conversation.

Levin's center tracks reports of hate crimes around the country. He said they are still reviewing the data and likely will be for some time, but since election day his staff has been overwhelmed by reports of bias crimes.

"The day after we received more reports than we see in an average week. It's too early to know what it means definitively, but what I can say that I've seen more reports than I can keep track of," he said. "That's what I'm worried about."

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-hate advocacy group, received 701 reports of bias attacks, including dozens on Trump supporters, in the first week after the election.

There is one thing New Jersey's 330 reported hate crimes in 2015 tells us -- hatred and prejudice have not disappeared in New Jersey. Until something changes, however, we just don't know how far or deep it goes.

Loading... Stephen Stirling may be reached at sstirling@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @sstirling. Find him on Facebook.