“What is The Hate Index? 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.
Who is behind The Hate Index? 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.
How are you doing this? 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.”