LA could see another record-breaking year for hate crimes
Hate crimes are up 15% in the City of Los Angeles so far this year, putting 2019 on track for an all-time high.
From Jan. 1 – Sept. 30, 2019, there were 252 hate crimes reported to the LAPD, compared with 219 from the same period a year earlier.
Last year set a record for hate crimes in the City of Los Angeles since at least 2010, when the LAPD first made its crime data publicly available.
Violent hate crimes, which have been on the rise in Los Angeles, also increased during the first nine months of this year.
A total of 115 violent hate crimes were reported, which is 46% of all hate crimes. Last year’s violent hate crime rate in the first nine months was 44%. There were 57 batteries, 47 aggravated assaults, five robberies, four “other assaults” and one criminal homicide reported.
There were four violent hate crimes reported against children in the first nine months of this year, including three reports of child abuse. One case involved a suspect shouting racial slurs while following a nine-year-old Hispanic child to his home.
There were 16 additional hate crimes against children in the first nine months of the year. In one case with multiple victims, a suspect threatened to kill four black students with a knife while using profanities and racial slurs at 5:30 p.m. on Sept. 13 at a local recreation center in the Rancho Park neighborhood. The LAPD arrested the suspect.
A total of 62 hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community were also reported in the first nine months of the year. That’s nearly a quarter of all reported hate crimes.
Just over half of the 62 crimes were against gay men, a group that continues to be one of the most frequently-targeted groups both nationwide and in Los Angeles. Eleven of the gay male victims were white, nine were Hispanic, and nine were black. The other four victims had unspecified ethnicities.
Out of the 14 anti-transgender hate crimes in the first nine months of the year, 11 of them targeted transgender women of color.
In one case we reported earlier this year, a man and a woman allegedly began shouting transphobic slurs at a group of queer people of color at 10:05 p.m. on Aug. 23 at the popular mezcal bar Las Perlas in Downtown.
Among racial and ethnic groups, Hispanic people were the most frequent victims of reported hate crimes for the first nine months of this year, with 70, followed by 62 white victims and 61 black victims. While all three ethnicities had similar proportions of violent hate crimes perpetrated against them, there were only five white victims of aggravated assault compared with 19 black victims and 22 Hispanic victims. There are more than three times as many white people as black people living in the City of Los Angeles, meaning that black people were disproportionately targeted.
How we did it: We examined publicly available LAPD data on reports of hate crimes in the City of Los Angeles. For neighborhood boundaries, we rely on the borders defined by the Los Angeles Times. Learn more about our data here.
LAPD data only reflects crimes that are reported to the department, not how many crimes actually occurred. In making our calculations, we rely on the data the LAPD makes publicly available.
The LAPD periodically updates past crime reports with new information, leading the department to recategorize past reports. We have been tracking hate crimes since Jan. 1, 2019, numbering them as the reported crime data is made public. Additionally, revised reports do not always automatically become part of the public database. But, we will keep monitoring hate crimes in the City of Los Angeles.
Want to know how your neighborhood fares? Or simply just interested in our data? Email us at askus@xtown.la.
