San Diego sees sharp rise in hate crimes

SAN DIEGO (CN) — The number of reported hate crimes in San Diego, California, rose dramatically last year, according to the city’s police department.

Why they rose so precipitously — whether that can be attributed to increased awareness of how to report such crimes, or the city being caught up in the wave of rising bigotry that’s been seen across the country — is up for debate among city leaders and community activists.

Towards the end of a presentation of 2023 crime statistics at a meeting of the San Diego City Council last week, San Diego Police Chief David Nisleit and Kimberly Kirkpatrick, a program coordinator for the department’s crime analysis unit, presented a study, which notes that 66 hate crimes were reported last year — nearly 74% increase from 2022, when 38 hate crimes were reported in San Diego.

According to police, 38% of the reported hate crimes were related to the ethnicity, 32% to sexual orientation, and 27% to religion.

More than half of the crimes targeting people because of their ethnicity were anti-Black hate crimes. Antisemitic hate crimes accounted for 44% of people targeted for their religious beliefs.

“A lot of it can be explained with what happened in Israel on Oct. 7 for the religious antisemitism. But you’re looking at two things in my opinion. A lot more education going out about what is a hate crime and what is a hate incident,” Nisleit told city council members. “But I think you’re looking at a very polarized divided country right now. There’s a lot of anger out there, and that’s festering, if you will.”

The San Diego Police Department did not respond to repeated requests for more information on the nature of the reported crimes, but Yusef Miller, the executive director of two local community activist organizations, North County Equity and Justice Coalition and Activist San Diego, had some insights.

“That’s pretty much the face of our county. People don’t want to accept it, but that’s the face of our county,” Miller said about anti-Black bigotry. It’s a hate that manifests in San Diego’s small Black population being overrepresented in its homeless residents, and high suspension rates of Black students from local schools, he added.

“It’s not a stretch to say that there’s a connection between Ds and Fs in schools and eventual homelessness, with job disparity being the bridge between the two,” Miller said.

Miller traces the anti-Black racism in the area back to ex-Confederate soldiers settling in the county, and an underbelly of hate amplified by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Last year, San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan indicted 17 alleged members of the Hells Angels for attacking three Black men in the neighborhood of Ocean Beach in June 2023.  An eighteenth defendant was added to the case later. Eleven of the defendants are being charged with hate crimes.

During the city council meeting, Councilmember Henry Foster III asked Nisleit about the police using license plate readers and surveillance cameras to catch perpetrators of hate crimes, like a recent string of drive-by pellet gun shootings outside of LGBTQ clubs in the city’s Hillcrest neighborhood.

Nisleit said he would like to see more surveillance technology set up around the city.

The best way to combat the scourge of hate is through workshops and educational initiatives that introduce people to their diverse neighbors and dispel ignorant ideas about them, Miller argued.

Educational programs, especially when hate incidents occur at schools, is one of the Anti-Defamation League’s strategies to combat an increase in antisemitic hate crimes as well, said Matthew Brown, the director of incident response and law enforcement initiatives at the ADL’s Western Division.

Brown, who is based in San Diego and is a member of the San Diego Anti-Hate Coalition with Miller, said the ADL recorded a 200% increase in antisemitic hate crime incidents in the region from 2022 to 2023, including targeting of religious institutions, vandalism, and assaults.

“A significant percent of those were Israel or Zionism-related,” Brown said. “There’s a conflation, if you will, of actions of the government of Israel and people holding Jews responsible for that.”

In July 2023, a man ripped off a piece of Rabbi Aharon Shapiro tzitzit — knotted fringes worn by observant Jews — while screaming antisemitic and anti-Israel comments at a 7-11 near San Diego State University. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime.

As a part of the ADL’s work tracking hate incidents and crimes, Brown said they team-up with law enforcement to track hate speech online, including anti-Zionist speech — especially if it targets individuals.

“We want to dispel the rumor, the notion, that the ADL believes that if you’re anti-Israel you’re antisemitic, no,” Brown said

However, he added that the ADL believes that “someone can’t be anti-Zionist and not be antisemitic.”

“Zionism, just that term, was created to carve out space for Jews," Brown said. “A place of refuge for Jews when Jews were being discriminated against. If someone is anti-Zionism, that means they’re denying Jewish people a refugee, or self-defense.”

Like the term Zionism itself, what anti-Zionism means has multiple definitions, including opposition to the Israeli government’s policies, opposition to Israel being solely a Jewish state, and opposition to the existence of Israel. Whether it equates to antisemitism, which is prejudice against Jewish people, is hotly debated, especially as protests against the Israel-Hamas war have pushed anti-Zionist Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace into the spotlight on college campuses across the country.

Brown claimed the group is antisemitic.

Miler said that calling anti-Zionism, as defined as criticism of the the actions of the Israeli government, antisemitism is dangerous because it not only tries to silence people’s right to criticize foreign governments and their own government, but it also conflates concern with the lives of Palestinian civilians as support for Hamas. It also leaves Palestinian San Diegans feeling like their pain is unacknowledged and dismissed, he added, and liable to lead them to feel disenchanted from reporting hate crimes committed against themselves or members of their community.

“I really think education gives a more permanent and lasting change to hate and bigotry,” Miller said. He wants the county to be “honest about its underbelly and open us up to diversity.”

*Editor’s note: The author is a volunteer music show host for the community radio station KNSJ, the license for which is held by Activist San Diego. *