Hate Crimes Map: Making Hate Crimes Visible Through Open Data

I launched Hate Crimes Map with a simple but uncomfortable observation: many hate crimes are technically documented, yet socially invisible.

They exist in spreadsheets, PDFs, and institutional reports. They rarely exist in our daily mental map of the world.

This project is my attempt to change that.

👉 Live project: https://www.hatecrimesmap.org

👉 Source code: https://github.com/kOaDT/hate-crimes-map

The problem I wanted to address

Hate crimes are often minimized, normalized, or quietly ignored.

Sometimes it’s because victims don’t report them. Sometimes it’s because authorities don’t record them consistently. Sometimes it’s because numbers without context fail to trigger empathy.

What Hate Crimes Map is

Hate Crimes Map is an open-source interactive map that visualizes reported hate crime incidents across OSCE member states.

The design is borrowed directly from pandemic dashboards like the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 map.

Hate crimes don’t spread biologically, but they do propagate socially. Normalization, silence, and repetition create patterns that look disturbingly similar to contagion.

Where the data comes from (and its limits)

All data comes from the ODIHR Hate Crime Reporting database:

🔗 https://hatecrime.osce.org/hate-crime-data

This database aggregates hate crime statistics reported by OSCE member states.

There are important caveats, and I want to be explicit about them:

• Coverage is limited to OSCE countries
• Reporting standards vary wildly
• Underreporting is massive in many regions
• Some countries report zero incidents, which does not mean zero crimes

The map does not claim to show the full reality. It shows the documented reality — which is already alarming enough.

This project is not affiliated with OSCE or ODIHR.

What this project is not

It’s not a predictive tool. It’s not a law enforcement product. It’s not a definitive measure of hate crimes globally.

It’s a visibility tool.

It’s meant to provoke questions like:

• Why does this country report so little?
• Why are spikes clustered here?
• What’s missing from this picture?

Those questions are more important than perfect answers.

As developers, we build dashboards for revenue, growth, and uptime every day. We can also build tools that surface uncomfortable truths.

Hate Crimes Map is my way of doing that — openly, transparently, and collaboratively.

If it makes even one person pause and rethink what “normal” looks like, it’s worth it.