An ugly trend in Orange County grew even uglier last year.
Hate crimes not only rose for the fifth year in a row but by the biggest jump — 24% — of the past five years.
The 2019 Hate Crimes Report released Tuesday, Oct. 20, cites 83 hate crimes reported last year to local law enforcement agencies, education institutions, and community-based organizations. That’s up from 67 in 2018.
The Orange County Human Relations Commission made the report public during a Zoom webinar held Tuesday evening.
The report, as it has in recent years, differentiates between hate crimes and hate incidents. In 2019, the county saw a slight drop in the number of hate incidents, from 165 two years ago to 156 such acts last year.
Under state law, hate crimes are criminal acts motivated by gender, nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation or disability. A hate incident is behavior that does not rise to the level of a crime, and often is protected as free speech under the First Amendment, but still targets people for the same reasons as hate crimes.
But hate incidents, as the report points out, do help “identify red flags for trends and potential hate crimes.”
Most local hate crimes in 2019 were motivated by the victim’s race, ethnicity or national origin. And Black people, the victims in 16 hate crime reports, bore the brunt of those attacks as the most targeted racial or ethnic group in Orange County last year even though Blacks account for less than 2% of the county’s population.
In one such hate crime, the suspect allegedly used anti-Black racial slurs and threatened to “pop” the victim’s head like a chicken.
Other racially-motivated hate crimes recorded in 2019 included a suspect who used anti-Hispanic slurs while assaulting the victim with a metal pipe and an incident on a tennis court where the suspect said “go back to Japan” and used a slur before attacking one of the victims.
OC Human Relations, the nonprofit that produces the annual hate crimes report and conducts education and other anti-hate programs, is tracking an increase in the targeting of Asian Americans this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Homophobia, religious bigotry
Anti-gay sentiment drove 78% of the 18 hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation or gender in 2019.
When it comes to religious intolerance, people of the Jewish faith were most often the victims of both hate crimes and hate incidents, according to the report.
Religion motivated 28% of the hate crimes last year in Orange County; Jews were the targets in 11 of those 21 reports. Nine other incidents evenly involved anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim and anti-Christian sentiment; one report was described as anti-Scientology.
Anti-Semitism was behind nearly two-thirds of the 44 hate incidents based on religion.
The most notorious hate incident last year involved a photo that surfaced on social media and showed a group of Orange County teens with arms raised in Nazi salutes as they stood around plastic red cups arranged in the shape of a swastika.
The photo, which drew national attention March 2019, was taken at an off-campus party attended by students from Newport Harbor, Costa Mesa, Estancia and Corona del Mar high schools. Members of the local Jewish community immediately responded by rallying around the students to educate them on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.
Harassment and hate speech made up nearly three-quarters of the 2019 hate incidents. Most, 44%, took place on school campuses.
The release of the 2019 Hate Crimes Report coincided with a virtual gathering that featured members of the commission, Orange County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Michelle Steel, and Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino.
In his introduction to the report, Michael Reynolds, who chairs the Human Relations Commission, points out that only “a small fraction” of hate crimes and incidents are actually reported to law enforcement. So while 83 hate crimes and 156 hate incidents might seem minimal in a county of 3.2 million residents, Reynolds said the data should not be taken lightly.
“We are confronted by the fact that hate crimes continue to rise,” Reynolds writes in the report. “We can — and we must — do better.”
Out in the open
The Orange County data differs from the annual hate crime report by the California Department of Justice, which cites an 8.3% decrease in local hate crimes during 2019, the report says. That’s because OC Human Relations incorporates hate crime reports from educational institutions that aren’t reflected in the state survey.
The Orange County data comes from 19 law enforcement agencies, 24 education institutions and five community-based organizations. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office filed charges on 18 of 30 hate crime-related cases it received in 2019, the report says.
The report also shows that hate often is not hidden.
Most of the hate crimes reported in 2019 (37%), happened in public places around Orange County. The most reported hate crime was public vandalism, from offensive words spray-painted on the front doors of local businesses to a swastika painted on a park bench.
Other hate-based criminal offenses, in descending number of reports ranged from aggravated assaults, simple assault, criminal threats, harassment, theft, assault and battery, and arson.
To report a hate crime, call OC Human Relations at 714-480-6580 or go to ochumanrelations.org/hatecrime.
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