Let’s proceed to the list of US cities where hate crimes are increasing. Insider Monkey has recently published an interesting article about it. Federal Bureau hate crime statistics show that the number of bias incidents jumped by 5%. In 2015, there were 5,850 crimes motivated by offender’s prejudice against victim’s religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, while the year later that number was 6,121. Of these, the majority were racially motivated, and among them hate crimes against blacks. At the same time, incidents triggered by hatred of a religion recorded significant increase. FBI statistics show that there was 20% jump in hate crimes against Muslims, which is consistent with findings of Pew Research Center about a rise in anti-Muslim discrimination.
Now without a further ado let’s see what Insider Monkey has investigated for us. We have picked three US cities where hate crimes are increasing from their list.
The first one is Columbus, OH. Hate crimes in Columbus increased from 137 in 2015 to 151 in 2016. Racially motivated incidents followed by crimes triggered by victim’s sexual orientation constituted the greatest share of all hate offenses. The rise in the number of hate crimes in Columbus is not surprising given the fact that Ohio ranked as sixth in hate crimes in 2016. The positive thing though is that Columbus is one of a few cities with a population over 250,000 that posted a decline in hate crimes during first nine months of 2017. The second city should be Toledo, OH. Toledo is another city located in Ohio which saw a significant rise in the number of hate crimes. According to FBI, in 2015 there were 19 hate incidents, while in 2016, 35 hate offenses occurred in Toledo. Of these, almost all were racially motivated. Another sources also report hate crime increase in last few years – from June 2013 through May 2015 there were 34 incidents. The number reached 76 from June 2015 through May 2017. Of these, 52 targeted blacks and 19 targeted whites. At last, but not least we are mentioning .San Leandro, CA, with the city of around 90,000 residents, which saw more than 600% increase in the number of hate crimes. In 2015 there were only 3 hate offenses while the year later the number was 22. While trying to explain the rise, police officials from San Leandro noted that in 2016 officers classified “incidents as hate crimes in cases that may not initially have been motivated by bigotry, but which involved a racial slur, misogynist comment, or homophobic remark.” Of 22 hate crimes reported in 2016, 15 were racially motivated.
