📈 Hate crimes up in Washington D.C.

Washington D.C. has a big problem which isn’t just the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino hate crimes in the U.S. capital has seen the highest rate of hate crimes per capita of any major city in the United States.

Unfortunately however, media attention on a vast majority of the hate crimes in D.C. were often overlooked by the media and went completely unpublished in some circumstances.

This past week however, the Washington Post examined all 204 crimes determined by D.C. police to have been motivated by hate. During that examination, WaPo interviewed a total of two dozen victims and a number of suspects.

“What emerged was a portrait of pervasive bigotry and violence: gay men and women assaulted on the street, transgender people threatened by strangers, African Americans taunted with slurs, Muslims harassed for wearing headscarves, synagogues subjected to anti-Semitic calls.”

Of the 204 hate crimes investigated by D.C. Police, 61 of those were incidents directed towards people due to their sexual orientation. As compared to other big cities in the United States, 45 hate crimes in New York had to do with sexual orientation, 16 in San Francisco and 34 in Seattle which was also that City’s biggest problem when it came to hate crimes.

For D.C. though, hate directed towards the LGBTQ community was far and away the biggest problem in terms of the breakdown with race the second most reported hate crime at 39 total incidents followed by ethnicity (36), gender identity (33 — which can also be seen as an LGBTQ hate crime as well), and religion (25).