http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1045904
Hate crimes crept up slightly in the Bay State last year but shot up nearly 8 percent nationwide, with more than half the victims targeted because of their race, according to a new FBI report.

Massachusetts law enforcement officials reported 379 hate crime incidents last year, a slight increase from the 372 the year before.

The report comes amid escalating racial tension at the MBTA, the state’s largest transit authority. The Herald last week reported two incidents involving nooses, including one in which a black train conductor found a hangman’s rope on the floor of his cab.

The Herald also reported last week that the T has been the subject of more than a dozen racial discrimination complaints in the past two years, including one from a Kenyan woman who said a bus driver did nothing as she was attacked by two women, called the N-word and told to sit in the back of the bus.

Nationwide, law enforcement officials reported 7,722 hate crime incidents in 2006, up 7.8 percent from the 7,163 incidents reported in 2005.

One of the year’s most disturbing string of hate crimes took place in Jena, La., but those incidents weren’t included in yesterday’s findings because the local agencies didn’t report them to the FBI. Only 12,600 of the country’s 17,000 police agencies participated in the 2006 reporting. In Massachusetts, only 85 of 328 statewide agencies reported incidents.

The Jena incident was sparked when three white students hung nooses from a tree. The white students were suspended from school but never criminally charged. Six black students were later charged with attempted second-degree murder for beating a white student unconscious. Those charges have since been reduced.

The Justice Department is investigating a number of noose incidents at schools, workplaces and neighborhoods around the country.

Nearly 52 percent of last year’s hate crimes were racially motivated, the report states.