Hate crimes against gays, lesbians, blacks, Jews and Latinos were up in Orange County in 2011, according to the OC Human Relations Council's 20th annual Hate Crime Report.
Similar crimes dipped from the previous year against whites, Muslims and Asians/Pacific Islanders, the same survey found.
Overall, reported hate crimes rose 14 percent over 2010's totals, the gender of most haters was unknown, and most hating took place in public.
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“Even as we have made strides
in intergroup understanding, the fears brought on by uncertainty in the economy, changing demographics, and international turmoil can result in more of this bias-related crime,” explains Carol Turpen, chairwoman of the OC Human Relations Council, in the introduction to the report you can read here:
Those numbers are small for a county with a population exceeding 3 million, but Rusty Kennedy, the longtime OC Human Relations Council executive director, notes in an email, “it is important to recognize that each hate crime
included in the report represents one of our neighbors who was targeted
simply because of some aspect of their being–their ethnicity,
religion, race, sexual orientation or ability.”
It's also important to recognize unreported hate crimes happen every day.
The report was released today at the Santa Ana offices of OC Human Relations after an introduction by Commissioner and Irvine Police Chief Dave Maggard, whose law enforcement agency was among many countywide that contributed data.
The council since 1971 “has worked to build bridges of understanding
to promote a vision of our community where all people are valued and
included and our diversity is realized as a source of strength,” according to its website.
Learn more at www.ochumanrelations.org, www.facebook.com/
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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.