Hate crime fell in U.S. in 2018. But that’s not what happened in Fresno, Valley
Hate crimes reported to police in Fresno County and across the central and southern San Joaquin Valley reached their highest in a decade in 2018, fueled by an increase in attacks or harassment aimed at African Americans.
Of 48 hate-motivated crimes law enforcement agencies reported to the state Department of Justice last year in the six-county region from Merced County in the north through Kern County in the south, 29 targeted victims because of their race or ethnicity. Those included 17 – more than one-third of the total – that were aimed at members of the African American community.
Data from the state indicates that the surge was particularly evident in Fresno County, where 14 anti-black crimes ranged from graffiti to intimidation, racial slurs, assault and rape. Those were among 22 crimes that police treated as having been motivated by bias based on race, ethnicity or ancestry.
Fresno County’s overall change in hate crime from 19 in 2017 to 32 last year represented a one-year surge of more than 68%. The number of hate crimes in the county in 2018 is four times what it was a decade ago. In 2009, eight hate crimes were reported in the county.
Ten additional crimes across the Valley, including three in Fresno County, were blamed on religious bias. Nine incidents were attributed to hate based on the victims’ gender identification or sexual orientation, including seven in Fresno County.
Over the course of the past 10 years, race has been the apparent motivation for about two-thirds of all hate crimes across the Valley; almost 30% of incidents were attributed by police to hate based on sexual orientation or gender identity. In Fresno County, about 55% of incidents were motivated by race and more than one-third on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Only one instance of hate crime was reported last year in Merced County – a burglary in March accompanied by graffiti at a home in Los Banos that was deemed to have been motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation. In 2017, three assaults in Merced County were attributed to hate: one anti-black attack in Atwater, one against a transgender individual at an Atwater bar, and one anti-Arab attack at a Merced liquor store.
The FBI reported in November that police agencies across the country fielded reports of more than 7,100 hate-motivated incidents in 2018. Almost 60% were fueled by bias based on race or ethnicity. Religious bias was blamed for 18.7% of hate crimes, while bias based on gender identity and sexual orientation together accounted for 18.9%.
The nationwide numbers represent a slight decline in the overall incidence of hate crime, but also show an increase in violent crime. The FBI’s annual hate crime report shows 24 people were killed and there were 22 report rapes identified as hate crimes in 2018 in the U.S..
The report is compiled by using data submitted by more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies around the U.S.
Religion-based hate crimes decreased by about 8 percent in 2018, with 835 incidents targeting Jews and Jewish institutions. That’s down from 938 incidents in 2017.
The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups across the country, said it believes that many more hate crimes are never reported by victims to police. “We know from previous (U.S.) Department of Justice studies that hate crime numbers are severely underreported and that an average of 250,000 people are victimized by hate crimes every year,” Heidi Beirich, director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project, wrote in an analysis of the FBI report.
The increase in violent hate crimes in the U.S., Beirich added, follows testimony this summer by FBI Director Christopher Wray to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the majority of domestic terrorism investigations are connected to white supremacy.
“Earlier this year in El Paso, we witnessed one of the deadliest white nationalist, anti-immigrant acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history,” Beirich wrote of a mass shooting in August at a Walmart store. She added that President Trump’s frequent rhetoric criticizing Latin American immigration “continues to normalize the bigotry that motivates hate crimes.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
