Lawfare: https://lawfareblog.com/search-data-white-supremacist-violent-crime

In Search of Data on White Supremacist Violent Crime

By Sarah Tate Chambers

Thursday, August 17, 2017, 12:31 PM

A cursory Google search for statistics on international terrorism, including acts committed on U.S. soil by individuals linked to foreign terrorist organizations, yields a gold mine. You can sort by group, country, or year. Curious about how ISIS prosecutions differ among federal districts? There’s data on that.

But attempt to figure out the amount of violent crime committed by white supremacists, internationally or domestically, and you’ll find yourself sorting through various government documents that are incomplete in a number of ways, covering only a small set of offenses or failing to label the offender’s ideology with specificity.

Why does this matter? Too often, white supremacists’ violent crimes are dismissed as the workings of semi-isolated, but certainly contained, individuals—so-called lone wolves. Without comprehensive data made available to the public, this characterization is difficult to rebut. Public access to this data is essential to full appreciation of the breath and severity of this criminal behavior.

In this post, I will explain the data and point out the gaps, cataloging what is available from federal and state governments and the non-governmental realm, as well as the data that might exist despite not being open to public access.