"According to this year's figures, violence against people because of their gender or sexual orientation are far outpacing reports of racial or ethnically-motivated hate crimes. That's interesting."

But the absolute number of gender/orientation bias crimes pretty much is unchanged since last year, and shows the least variation. The real question is what happened to race/color crimes in 2010? Obviously 2010 isn't over. Is there some seasonal effect with crimes against minority races?

The police went ahead and picked up the slack on the crimes against racial minorities. That's just not reflected in the statistics.