1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Hate Crimes Commission Act of 2017 . 2. Findings The Congress finds as follows: (1) The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines a hate crime to be a criminal offense—such as murder, arson, or vandalism—against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity. (2) Forty-five States and the District of Columbia have statutes criminalizing various types of bias-motivated violence or intimidation. (3) The Federal Government has had hate crimes statutes since 1968, with the most recent law enacted in 2009. (4) The impact of underreporting on hate crimes statistics hinders hate crimes prevention. (5) According to multiple, nonpartisan studies, hate crimes have increased sharply over the past year, with over 900 new hate incidents reported since November 2016. (6) The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that in 2016, there was a 6.7-percent increase in reported hate crimes since the prior year, one of the largest one-year increases in over a decade. (7) In May 2017, the FBI found that White supremacists and rightwing extremist groups were responsible for 49 deaths in 26 incidents between 2000 and 2016, the most of any domestic extremist group. The same report found that White supremacists and rightwing extremist groups were the largest threat of domestic terror, and were likely to continue to pose a lethal threat over the next year. (8) In February 2017, a White supremacist entered a bar in Kansas and shot at two Indian men, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani while shouting racial epithets. Srinivas later died of his injuries. (9) The nonpartisan Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism documented 55 instances of anti-Semitism between January and March 2017 in New York City alone, a 189-percent increase from the same time period in 2016, and close to 100 bomb threats have been received by Jewish Community Centers and Schools. (10) Since January,