The FBI released figures Monday that showed there were 27 hate crimes reported to Orange County law enforcement agencies in 2013. These reports do not specify the individual incidents, but the feds do give the cities where each occurred so that we may listiclize those cities.
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Orange County Leads California In Anti-Islamic Hate Crime Complaints
1) Westminster
The leader of the pack with five reports, we know that one hate crime there centered on religion, one dealt with sexual orientation and another was based on a disability. Of course, it could have just been one gay Jewish guy with a limp, but still.
2) Garden Grove
Falling just behind its neighbor with four reports, Garden Grove shared with Westminster two racially motivated incidents and four spurred by ethnicity. Odds are someone from Little Saigon played a role in at least one, no?
3) Newport Beach
The only coastal spot to crack the top five, Newport Beach and rich white privilege were, of course, immortalized by the classic words in the first episode of teen soaper The O.C., “Welcome to the O.C., bitch. This is how it's done in Orange County.”
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4) TIE: Buena Park and Unincoporated County of Orange
The city that should have stayed unincorporated and actual land that is unincorporated shared the fourth spot on this hateful list.
6) TIE: Costa Mesa, Dana Point, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Laguna Beach, La Habra, Lake Forest, Los Alamitos, Placentia, Santa Ana and Yorba Linda
Each of these places only generated one hate crime report each, which is … uh … good news?
Hey, at least OC is less hateful than Los Angeles County, where there were 114 reports in 2013, according to the FBI. But also not all OC hate crimes are reported to cops (as the story linked to above indicates). And not all crimes that appear to have hateful elements are considered hate crimes by authorities.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.