Column: New LA County hate crime report makes for ‘grim’ reading

There’s an old Twilight Zone episode I thought about a lot while reading the new hate crimes report published last week by the Los Angeles County Commission of Human Relations.

Titled “I Am the Night, Color Me Black,” the episode aired in the spring of 1964, a few months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The murder had shaken show creator Rod Serling and he wrote the episode as his response.

In the episode, the sun never rises for a small midwestern town set to execute a convicted murderer that day. Throughout the morning, which gets darker with each passing hour, the viewer learns two things: the victim of the crime was a vicious white supremacist, and the man sentenced to hang for the crime has no remorse for killing the man. 

By the time most townspeople have gathered at the gallows to cheer on the execution at high noon, it’s pitch black outside. It’s then that the town’s reverend, a Black man, diagnoses the problem: everyone has so much hate bottled up inside that they had to vomit it out, and now their town is drowning in rage. The episode ends with a radio report that more places around the world (Dallas, Berlin, Vietnam, etc.) have been plunged into darkness as racial and political rage consumes them, too.

Which brings me to the commission’s findings. Titled “No More Silence,” the 48-page document is the latest in a series of annual reports from the Human Relations Commission documenting hate crimes across LA County. 

Though the cover image depicts a light-skinned hand firmly grasping a Black hand in solidarity, the report is anything but optimistic. By the time I got to page eight, I saw some variation of the phrase “largest number ever recorded” in reference to five different hate crime statistics for the year 2023, which the report covers.

Anti-Black, anti-trans, anti-Jewish and anti-Latino crimes hit their highest recorded levels last year, as well as hate crimes in general. Anti-Asian crimes were the second-highest number ever recorded, according to the report.

Rising hate crimes aren’t limited to Los Angeles County. In its 2023 report, which covers 2022 hate crime data, the Orange County Human Relations Commission found that hate activity in OC had increased an astonishing 94% over the previous five years. County officials, however, did not renew the contract with the non-profit that helps prepare the annual report, so no 2023 data is available.

The latest LA County report, meanwhile, makes clear that Black people were “grossly over-represented” in racial hate crimes, making up 49% of all racial hate crime victims.

There were also 99 anti-transgender crimes in 2023, representing a chilling 125% increase over the previous year, according to the report. Not only was this the largest number ever documented in LA County, the report states that nearly all the crimes (97%) were violent. 

Last year also saw a massive increase in the number of hate crime attacks in public, rising from 320 in 2022 to 531 — a 66% increase in just one year. And blatant white supremacist crimes — attacks involving a swastika in graffiti or the yelling of a white supremacist slogan, for instance — increased 49%, from 140 in 2022 to 209 in 2023, according to the report.

The report includes a number of accounts of specific hate crimes, including one that involved a white trans woman who was listening to music and dancing at an unnamed park in Long Beach. 

“Two Latino male suspects approached the victim from behind and pushed her to the ground,” the report states. “They sprayed her back with silly string, threw glass at her and a can which hit the top of her eyebrow. As the victim ran away, she heard the suspects yell, ‘faggot’ at her.”

“This report is grim,” 4th District Supervisor Janice Hahn said in a statement released Dec. 11, the day the report came out. “The hate crimes detailed in it are serious. Many of them are violent. They leave victims across the county permanently, even if not visibly, scarred. They shatter the sense of safety these individuals had and, in many cases, destroy it for their families and communities as well.”

Especially grim is the report’s discussion of who is actually perpetrating these hate crimes. It’s not a simple answer, especially where racist attacks are concerned. 

For anti-Black crimes, more than half (52%) of perpetrators are Latino, and 41% are white, the report states. In anti-Latino attacks, more than half of suspects (again, 52%) are Black, while 33% are white. The suspects are more or less equally spread out ethnically in anti-Asian attacks, with 38% being white, 34% Black and 26% Latino. But in anti-white crimes (one, if not the only, hate crime category that actually dropped in LA County in 2023), 71% of suspects are Black. 

But in terms of gender, men commit far more hate crimes than women, according to the report. It’s not even close.

In sexual orientation hate crimes (most of which targeted gay men), 89% of suspects are male, the report states. In gender hate crimes (the vast majority of which were committed against trans individuals), 86% of suspects were male. It was the same story with gang-related hate crimes, with 85% of suspects being male, according to the report.

There is no gender breakdown of suspects for racial hate crimes in the report.

Though many of these statistics broke previous records in the county, hate crime incidents have been rising for years. As this table from the report shows, hate crimes dropped to their lowest level ever recorded in the county in 2013, but then began ticking up in 2015, and started climbing steeply in 2020.

The report largely pins the blame for the rise in hate crimes in the county on more people speaking up these days. 

“Undoubtedly, the record-setting levels of reported hate crimes in 2023 are due in large part to improved reporting of these human rights violations,” the report states. “More people are reporting hate, and more organizations and groups are submitting reports.”

This would seem to be good news, and probably explains the report’s optimistic, even triumphant cover image. But even if this is true, it’s not much cause for hope. If we’re seeing more crimes because victims are speaking up more, that means there are far more hate crimes in society than most people probably realize, which points to a far more delicate social fabric than many would like to admit.

The report’s findings also track with recent research into racial bias and resentment, according to Cal State Long Beach political science professor Matt Lesenyie. 

“In terms of explanation, I’d like to say that the increase in attacks, particularly the giant increase in ‘in public’ attacks, is linked to a growing resentment about limited economic opportunities for all, but particularly whites,” Lesenyie told me. “The second piece I’d add to that is that our politics reflect these resentments about who is getting ahead in society.”

In 2022, scholars David C. Wilson and Darren W. Davis, from UC Berkeley and Notre Dame University, respectively, published “Racial Resentment in the Political Mind,” which argued that a major force in American politics today was stemming from white peoples’ perception that Black people were unfairly gaining rewards from civil rights efforts to eliminate structural racism. Further anxiety about the nation’s increasing ethnic diversity intensifies this resentment on the part of white Americans, according to the authors. 

For Wilson and Davis, President-elect Donald Trump is a master at stoking this resentment.

“Trump not only pushed that change is unnecessary,” Wilson said in this UC Berkeley news release, “but said that, on a continuum of racial progress, ‘We’ve gone too far. We need to not only stop, but we need to go back.’”

For Lesenyie, this helps explain the steady rise in hate crimes throughout the county over the last decade. 

“I think Trump or no Trump, people are pushing back against political correctness,” Lesenyie said. “That’s not to justify it, nor to credit Trump with its expansion. I think we’re seeing a generational shift away from decorum and tolerance broadly. I think Trump is aware of this shift, but isn’t necessarily driving it.”

There’s nothing easy about how to deal with this. The county report authors spend a couple pages on county efforts, ordinances, trainings and events designed to counter hate crimes, but given the demographics of who is committing hate crimes, it’s clear that structural changes are necessary in how American schools and society in general deal with race, religion, sexual orientation and gender, especially where men are concerned.

Otherwise, we risk our collective rage and resentment smothering us all in darkness.