Report: Anti-Asian, Anti-Gay Crimes Skyrocketed In Los Angeles County Last Year – CBS Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) — Hate crimes in Los Angeles County are at their highest point in more than a decade, according to an annual report released Wednesday by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations.
Los Angeles County saw 635 reports of hate crimes in 2020, according to the report. Racially-motivated crimes spiked 53%, the largest numeric and percentage increase since 2003, and the report found explicit evidence of white supremacist ideology in 19% of violent hate crimes reported in the county last year, compared to 22% the previous year.
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LOS ANGELES, CA – MARCH 22: Asian community members hold signs calling for hate to stop at news conference organized to take a unified stand opposing hate crimes against members of the Asian Pacific Islander community on Monday, March 22, 2021 in Los Angeles, CA. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
The new study revealed “an explosion of hate that broke record after record,” said Robin Toma, the commission’s executive director. He said the pandemic unleashed a “wave of hate and hostility against Asian Americans, who were unfairly blamed for coronavirus, and violently terrorized.”
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The report confirmed the perception that anti-Asian hate crimes had skyrocketed in 2020 – such incidents went up by 76% last year, when physical and verbal attacks ramped up due to the pandemic. Most of those incidents involved physical violence.
Crimes targeting gay men were also up 84%, even as anti-transgender crimes declined from 42 to 32 in 2020 – a number that was still the third-largest ever reported in the county.
But despite the alarming numbers, the report says the crimes reported in 2020 is well below the numbers reported during the late 1990s and 2000s. Another bright spot in the report is that religious crimes have gone down 18%. But of the religious crimes that were reported, most were anti-Semitic.
(© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. City News Service contributed to this report.)