2017-03-14

the-movemnt:

Report: Election rage made hate crimes rise by 20% in major US cities last year

Nine major U.S. cities reported increases in hate crimes by more than 20% in 2016, according to one researcher who spoke to NBC News on Tuesday.

The reason for the spike? Flaring tensions in the wake of the 2016 presidential election.

California-based researcher Brian Levin culled data from police departments as director of the nonpartisan Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, where he teaches criminal justice.

The new numbers show that bias crimes increased in the nine major metropolitan areas he studied — New York; Washington; Chicago; Philadelphia; Montgomery County, Maryland; Columbus, Ohio; Seattle; Long Beach, California; and Cincinnati — in the wake of the election.

“We might very well be at the start of a trend where anti-Semitic incidents are going up each year,” Levin told NBC. “We were seeing an over-decade decline in anti-Semitic incidents.

According to NBC, hate crimes against Muslims and the LGBTQ community accounted for most of the growth reported in the rate of bias crimes in America. Read more (3/14/17 5:21 PM)

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