California: The hate group capital of the US?
Of all the states in the union, who would have thought that traditionally blue, allegedly liberal, California would have more hate groups than anywhere else in the country.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Groups Map, California leads the United States in existence of hate groups, with 80 different groups. Most of the groups are either skinhead or neo nazi, but there were also seven different klan groups.
Also included in the list were several different (LA, SD & Oakland) chapters of the Nation of Islam and the Jewish Defense League.
The site also included a *list of hate crimes by state and California had 67 listed for 2008. Most of the offenses listed involved vandalism.
* - These incidents include only a fraction of the approximately 191,000 reported and unreported hate crimes that a 2005 government report estimated occur annually.
Stats from the 2007 “LOS ANGELES COUNTY COMMISSION ON HUMAN RELATIONS”.
I Hate crimes in Los Angeles County rose 28%, from 594 to 763, the highest in five years. I The most common type of hate crimes were those motivated by racial/ethnic or national origin bias (“racial hate crimes”): 535, or 68% of the total.
There were 310 anti-African American crimes (58%) followed by 125 anti-Latino crimes (23%).
These represented sharp increases from the previous year. Crimes against Asians and whites also rose. Crimes in which anti-immigrant slurs were used declined slightly. Attacks on inter-racial couples and mixed race groups of friends grew.
The second largest group of hate crimes were motivated by sexual orientation (111) rep-resenting an increase of 9%. Of these, 92% targeted gay men and 8% were anti-lesbian.
Religious crimes were the third largest category (105) and grew 17%. Anti-Jewish crimes dominated (74%).
Tension between African Americans and Latinos again characterized an alarming number of hate crimes. In anti-black crimes, 71% of the suspects were Latino. In crimes targeting Latinos, black suspects constituted 56% of the total.
Gang members committed a large number of racial hate crimes and were responsible for two attempted murders. Sixteen percent of all hate crimes were tied to gangs. Gang members were suspects in 21% of racial hate crimes.
White supremacists were implicated in 17% of all hate crimes and committed overwhelmingly racial and religious crimes.
All of the crimes targeting transgender victims (100%) were violent, followed by 76% of sexual orientation, 71% of racial and 25% of
religious crimes.
Suspects identified were overwhelmingly male (91%) and 33% were juveniles; a 38% were young adults 18-25; and 29% were older than 25.
Geographically, hate crimes took place across Los Angeles County, but the largest numbers were clustered in the Metro, the Antelope Valley, the San Fernando Valley, and South regions.
One of the most interesting statistics above is that more gang members were committing hate crimes than white supremacists.
Lastly, check this story from the Huffington Post regarding threats against our President Elect:
Also take a look at this AP story on post election hate crimes: “Race Crimes Around Country Spurred By Obama’s Win”
So to those of you that think everything is going to be different overnight, you see that this country still has a lot of work to do.
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November 17th, 2008 at 3:22 am
[…] Tension between African Americans and Latinos again characterized an alarming number of hate crimes. In anti-black crimes, 71% of the suspects were Latino. More […]