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Column: Hate crimes hit records in many cities, emphasizing need for community resilience

A San Francisco city train reads "Speak Up, Be Heard, Report Now. Report Hate Crimes to the FBI."
An ad on a San Francisco city train reads “Speak Up, Be Heard, Report Now. Report Hate Crimes to the FBI.” It was part of a publicity campaign by the San Francisco FBI office in May to encourage victims of hate crimes to come forward and report hate incidents.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Hate crimes nearly doubled in San Diego in 2021, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism

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If you felt like you were hearing more about local incidents of hate this past year, it turns out there’s a reason for that.

They were occurring more frequently.

The number of hate crimes reported in San Diego nearly doubled from 25 in 2020 to 46 in 2021, the highest annual total in over a decade, according to preliminary data gathered by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino.

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That number likely understates how often hate crimes were occurring in San Diego. Incidents of hate are often underreported, experts say, and some law enforcement agencies differ in how they document hate crimes.

Also it is also fairly rare to accurately document how many hate crimes target members of our homeless community, for instance.

Regardless, San Diego’s spike in hate is noteworthy, and it is in line with a trend we’re seeing in major metropolitan areas across the U.S. over the past several years.

In the past year alone nearly 1,000 more incidents of hate crimes were reported than the year before, increasing from 7,287 in 2020 to 8,263 incidents in 2021.

That number represents the highest level of incidents reported since the record-breaking year of 2001. Major cities, in particular, have been targets for hateful activity.

For example, the number of reported hate crimes nearly doubled in New York City and San Francisco last year, to 538 and 112 cases respectively. Meanwhile Los Angeles recorded the most hate crimes of any U.S. city in this century, 615 hate crimes reported to police in 2021.

The figures for New York, Chicago and Austin also represented 21st-century highs.

“It is a national snapshot, and it is a disturbing snapshot after a troubling year in 2020,” said Brian Levin, Executive Director at the Center for Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino.

In 2020, a large portion of hate activity was directed at Asian Americans and Blacks — in correlation with certain world events.

For instance in June 2020, when we as a nation were experiencing one of the most massive, widely dispersed protests for social justice in U.S. history after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, we also saw the worst month for anti-Black hate crime since the Center began tracking data in 1991. This came after anti-Black hate crimes had largely been on the downswing over the past few decades.

Similarly, Asian Americans — who have been regularly used as scapegoats in response to the pandemic — were targeted at record rates throughout 2020. The center’s analysis found that New York, LA, San Francisco, Columbus, Ohio, Denver, Cincinnati and Washington D.C. documented a total of 62 anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020, a 124 percent increase for those jurisdictions over the prior year.

That number jumped again in 2021, with those cities reporting 274 anti-Asian hate crimes.

Still, those figures almost certainly represent vast undercounts. For example, Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition of groups, received reports of 10,370 hate incidents between March 2020 and September 2021, with about 1,669 of those incidents involving physical assaults.

“I think it shows that the hatred that was galvanized in 2020 continued to reverberate into 2021,” Levin said.

At this point, the preliminary data cannot really be used to make comparisons between cities, according to Levin.

Again, hate crimes are often underreported. Part of the variance between cities likely comes from the fact that advocacy efforts can affect how comfortable victims feel about turning to authorities and reporting hate crimes.

Such efforts have really ramped up in certain regions, especially over the past year, but not in others. For example, the Center credits initiatives by advocacy organizations in LA, Austin, New York and Chicago as contributing to the increased reporting in crimes.

Another reason comparisons between cities also isn’t particularly relevant is because it may distract from the larger issue, Levin cautioned.

“You get to a point of critical mass, where the direction (of the trend) is what is important,” he said. “When you have LA, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and three of them are 21st-century highs, even with expanded definitions and outreach, that’s something.”

Generally, Levin said, there is a correlation between the demographics of community and who is getting attacked in hate incidents, with neighborhood tensions and perceptions of inequality in the local area factoring in as well.

However, there also are nationally galvanizing events, such as those previously mentioned, that contribute to this trend, as does the rhetoric of some elected officials, and the failures of social media companies to prevent their platforms from serving as recruiting grounds for hateful ideologies.

“That (bigotry) is influenced by a compliant social media and a hardened and irresponsible political type of retransmission,” Levin said. “I think people will look back and say, ‘Why didn’t we require more of our politicians and the social media companies, and why didn’t we have a focus on community resilience?’”

Community resilience can take a lot of forms — community groups, interfaith dialogues, etc. — but at the heart of all the efforts related to it is the idea that the community coalesces in times of hardship, rather than dividing and targeting certain groups.

That’s the heart of why I think it’s so important for us to not be numb to the growing hatred we see.

The need to foster resilience is part of the reason I feel it’s important to spend a significant amount time in these columns talking about what we see in the trends of hateful activity.

At this point, especially if you read this column regularly, you may feel it’s exhausting and maybe a bit repetitive, talking about how hate is playing out in our community and beyond. But it’s important to remain vigilant and keep discussing it, because we could become numb to it and make the mistake of viewing these things as isolated incidents.

Hate can quickly fester and grow, and even one incident can be a warning sign of a larger problem. If we needed any reminder of that, look no further than the jumps we’ve seen in hate crime numbers in San Diego and beyond.

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