Hate crimes against Jews soar in Los Angeles

From Crosstown:

In the first six months of 2021, there were 43 hate crimes targeting Jewish people, according to Los Angeles Police Department data. That is a 59.2% increase from the same timeframe last year, and more than double the number of incidents in a comparable period in 2018. 

“What’s been especially troubling is the frequency, intensity and brazenness of the anti-Semitic hate crimes recently,” said Sam Yebri, an attorney who is active in the local Jewish community.

Yebri, who is running for the open District 5 City Council seat in 2022, added, “There has been an explosion of hate of all kinds, especially anti-Semitism, on social media over the last two years that has generated a focus, whether it’s on the far left or the far right, on Jews.”

The LAPD defines a hate crime as “any criminal act or attempted criminal act directed against a person or persons based on the victim’s actual or perceived race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, disability or gender.”

Anti-Jewish attacks made up 14.6% of the 295 hate crimes reported in Los Angeles in the first half of 2021. Jewish people were the third most-targeted population; 25.5% of the reports were listed as “anti-Black or African American,” and the LAPD classified 16.3% of the hate crimes as “anti-Hispanic or Latino.”

I cannot parse out these statistics from the full dataset of crimes in Los Angeles, but based on State of California statistics from last year, the vast majority - 64% - of anti-religion hate crimes are against Jews. 

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