As the project investigating hate in America comes to an end, we look back at reporting highlights and the impact of our work.

By Rachel Glickhouse @ Propublica.org, Jan. 2

[....] Over the course of the project, we worked with more than 180 professional newsrooms, around 20 college papers and many journalism schools. All told, we collected more than 6,000 reporting tips and thousands of pages of police records on hate crimes, and together we produced more than 230 stories. In addition to stories we produced directly, our journalism had a ripple effect [....]

We found a number of patterns in the tips we received and the police records we gathered. “Go back to your country” or “go back to X country” was one of the most common phrases we encountered in both hate crimes and bias incidents. We saw a large number of hate incidents in schools, particularly after the 2016 election. Latinos have been targeted based on the (often erroneous) belief that they are immigrants or for speaking Spanish. People of color reported being victimized by people who referred to the president or his border and immigration policies. We found people of color harassed by their neighbors and targeted in hate incidents at superstores. We heard from Muslims and people of Arab descent targeted in road rage incidents [....]

The reporting ProPublica and our partners did varied widely. We dug into how law enforcement agencies investigate and track hate crimes, looking at the many reasons hate crimes are falling through the cracks. We looked into how police are trained (or not) to deal with bias crimes, and why hate crimes are so difficult to prosecute. And we reported extensively on white supremacist groups, investigating members in the military and those who engaged in violence and even murder [....]