State saw 122 hate crimes in 2017

While Connecticut was an exception, hate crimes reported to the FBI from across the country increased 17 percent from 2016 to 2017.

Some say the jump was predictable amid a torrent of angry, biased speech, and President Donald Trump has been accused of fanning the flames of hate through divisive oratory.

While the president has denied those accusations, “officials on the local, state and federal level need to be aware of their rhetoric,” said Andy Friedland, associate director of the Connecticut chapter of AntiDefamation League.

Across the country, law enforcement agencies submitted 7,175 incident reports in 2017 regarding crimes motivated by bias toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender and gender identity. In 2016, data showed, there were 6,121 instances of such reported hate crimes.

The 2017 report showed the most common bias category was toward race/ ethnicity/ancestry — which made up 59.6 percent of incidents — followed by religion-driven hate crimes, which made up 20.6 percent, and sexual orientation at 15.8 percent.

Out of the 4,229 hate crimes focused on race/ ethnicity/ancestry in 2016, 2,122 incidents were classified in the anti-black or anti-African-American category. Last year, 2,358 of the 4,832 incidents fell into that category.

Messages seeking comment from the NAACP were not immediately returned Wednesday.

Friedland said the ADL’s own data show that antiSemitic taunting, bullying, vandalism and other similar crimes increased nationwide by 57 percent in 2017 from 2016. That’s the largest single-year increase the organization has recorded, he said.

“The last couple of years have been abnormal and significant in the increases we’ve seen,” Friedland said. “Hate crimes don’t happen in a vacuum, they always start somewhere. Hateful rhetoric or speech leads to hate crimes.”

In the state, there were 122 reported hate crimes in 2017 — down from 124 the year before — according to FBI Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting released this week. The number of hate-crime assaults — simple and aggravated — reported in Connecticut also dropped from 30 in 2016 to 23 last year.

The FBI numbers for 2017 were gathered from 16,149 law enforcement agencies, and Connecticut’s reported hate crimes included three aggravated assaults, 20 simple assaults, 41 instances of intimation and 39 incidents of damage or destruction.

In 2016, Connecticut reported 12 aggravated assaults, 18 simple assaults, 40 instances of intimidation and 39 incidents of damage or destruction. Data from 2016 came from 15,254 agencies.

“Reporting hate crime data to the UCR Program allows the public, researchers, community leaders and local government to raise awareness of the issue and gain a more accurate picture of hate crimes,” the FBI said.

While 2018 numbers were not part of this FBI report, hate has made news in Connecticut and around the country in recent weeks — most notably on Oct. 27, when a man opened fire at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people and injuring six.

The ADL said that was likely the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the nation’s history.

Connecticut has also seen swastikas drawn at schools in Stratford, Danbury, Greenwich, Ridgefield and Wilton. On Nov. 8, Stamford police reported swastikas drawn on city sidewalks. And this week, students at Amity Regional High School in Woodbridge reported feeling unsafe because of hate talk and anti-Semitic symbols there.

In 2016, there were 1,538 religion-driven hate crimes nationwide reported to the FBI, with 834 related to anti-Jewish sentiments. In 2017, those number jumped up to 1,679 incidents with 976 of them being antiJewish.

In Bridgeport, Police Chief Armando Perez said the city doesn’t see many hate crimes.

“Fortunately, we’re on the lower end. We don’t really have that kind of problem,” he said. “But we do pay particular attention when something like that happens.”

In New York, there were 559 hate crime incidents reported in 2017, data showed. And in Massachusetts, there were 486 hate crime incidents.

“Although the numbers increased last year, so did the number of law enforcement agencies reporting hate crime data — with approximately 1,000 additional agencies contributing information,” the FBI said.

A breakdown of the 2017 hate crimes can be found at ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017.