A majority of the 10 largest U.S. cities reported an increase in hate crimes last year, increases that averaged 11%, Axios reports. The total was a record 2,173 cases. It’s the third straight year of spikes in the big cities’ average number of hate crimes. It comes as the Israel-Hamas war has sparked jumps in antisemitic and anti-Muslim hate crimes in late 2020. The rise in hate crimes happened even as the U.S. was on course to end 2023 with one of the largest annual drops in homicides on record. The largest spike in hate crimes out of any of the 10 major cities was in Houston, which saw 85 hate crimes in 2023, a 193% increase from the year before, says a draft report from California State University, San Bernardino.
San Diego (47%), Chicago (43%) and Los Angeles (13%) also experienced surges and hit modern records dating back to the early 1990s. The report reflects a 23-year trend of increasing hate crimes nationwide, driven in part by better data collection from police and state agencies. These overall increases in hate crime also extended to major cities outside the ten largest ones, including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Denver, Seattle, Boston and Salt Lake City. Anti-Jewish hate crimes, which spiked in the fall after the the violent conflict in the Middle East, have supplanted Black Americans as the most targeted group in the ten largest cities, probably for the first time. In New York, anti-Jewish hate crimes rose 12.6%, while Los Angeles saw a 48% jump and Chicago experienced a 10% increase. Anti-Muslim hate crimes also jumped 22%, 40% and 300% in the same cities, respectively.