Researcher: national victim survey undercounts bias violence; redesign aims to capture more incidents

Lynn Langton, PhD, program director for the Victimization and Response Program at RTI International, told the California Commission on the State of Hate that survey data and police reports measure different things and that the NCVS consistently identifies far more hate‑crime victimizations than the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system.

"I couldn't even add the UCR numbers to this chart without having two different axes," Langton said, summarizing a 2023 comparison in which NCVS estimates are orders of magnitude higher than law‑enforcement counts. Langton described NCVS estimates through 2023 as publicly available through the Inter‑university Consortium for Social and Political Research.

Langton explained that the NCVS measures criminal acts and asks victims whether they believe the offender targeted them because of a protected characteristic. To qualify as a hate crime in the NCVS a victim must report a crime and some corroborating evidence—most commonly the offender’s use of derogatory language, leaving hate symbols, or police confirmation.

Her team’s 2020 assessment for the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found two related problems in how the NCVS then asked about bias motivation: a screener that asked whether the incident was a "hate crime" caused some qualifying incidents to be missed, and the phrasing sometimes captured situations of general aggression rather than true bias motivation. "We were missing a lot of incidents that should have been classified as hate crimes but weren't," she said.

As a remedy, RTI recommended asking respondents whether specific motivations or indicators were present without using the label "hate crime" as the screener. Langton said BJS is implementing a larger NCVS redesign in 2025 that will include revised wording; those redesigned questions are expected to be fielded in 2025 with new, comparable estimates released in 2026.

Commissioners pressed Langton on methodologic limits. Commissioner Che asked whether victims might "racialize" incidents that were not motivated by bias; Langton said narrative responses and revised question wording are intended to reduce that misclassification. Vice Chair Damsky asked how NCVS corroboration interacts with First Amendment protections; Langton emphasized the NCVS records crimes in which speech occurred in the context of criminal conduct, not protected speech alone.

Langton also highlighted underreporting: in 2023 more than half of hate crimes recorded by the NCVS were not reported to police, a gap she and commissioners said makes surveys essential for understanding the scale of bias violence and for designing responses.

The commission thanked Langton and asked staff to circulate her report and the NCVS data link. Langton said the data available through 2023 will be supplemented once the redesigned instrument is analyzed in the coming year.