The Lawrence Police Department recorded only five “hate crimes” in 2013, down significantly from the 15 hate crimes reported the year before.

The FBI publishes statistics on hate crimes each year. The latest report indicated there were 10 such crimes in Lawrence last year. But police spokesman Trent McKinley said some of those were coded incorrectly by the officers who filled out the reports, and upon further review they said there were only five.

“We contacted the (Kansas Bureau of Investigation) and asked for the data they prepared, which would have been shared with the FBI for their report,” McKinley said in an email. “Once we had the case numbers which indicated bias, we read each of the reports and determined we actually had only five crimes involving hate/bias. Others indicating bias were either miscoded by the officer who improperly entered data in that field or the officer not properly interpreting the (Kansas Incident Based Reporting System) instructions outlining when hate/bias should be marked.”

The FBI defines hate crimes as crimes motivated by “biases based on race, gender, gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation and ethnicity.”

McKinley provided descriptions of each of the incidents that were classified as hate crimes last year, but he did not provide the dates or names of the suspects or victims. They included:

• A suspect who yelled “white power” and used a racial slur toward an African-American victim.

• A male juvenile suspect who attempted to force another male juvenile’s head into the suspect’s lap while alleging the victim was homosexual.

• A juvenile male suspect who was “humming a Nazi victory song” to a Jewish juvenile male victim. The victim then made a reference to the suspect’s mother, and the suspect punched the victim.

• A white male suspect who had an anti-black reference written in marker on the side of his home.

• And an African-American male victim who reported a white male called him a racial slur then displayed a knife while walking past the victim’s home.

The outcomes of those cases were not immediately available.