Hate crimes rise in Orange County for fourth straight year

Hate is on the rise in Orange County. Again.

The number of hate crimes reported in the county has increased in each of the last four years, and the jump in 2018 – 11% – was the largest, according to a county report released Thursday, Sept. 26.

There were 67 hate crimes reported in the county last year, according to the annual Hate Crime Report released by the Orange County Human Relations Commission. During the same period, there were 165 hate incidents – defined as non-criminal acts that express hate – an increase of 71%.

The most serious local crime involving a hate element was highlighted in both the report and at the Thursday morning meeting to present and discuss the report’s findings: the murder of Blaze Bernstein.

The body of the 19-year-old from Lake Forest, who was Jewish and openly gay, was found early last year in a shallow grave at a park near his home. He’d been stabbed to death several days earlier. The man accused of killing Bernstein, a former high school classmate, faces a murder charge with a hate crime enhancement related to Bernstein’s sexual orientation.

Gideon Bernstein and Jeanne Pepper Bernstein, Blaze Bernstein’s parents, attended the report presentation Thursday in Irvine to talk about their son and the need to root out hate crimes and work toward a kinder world.

“This could have been the end of hopes and the end of dreams. We acknowledge we lost something very important to the fabric of our lives. We lost our child,” Jeanne Pepper Bernstein told the crowd of about 100 people.

“We had the choice that we could either … seek revenge and be bitter and live with this privately and be tortured by it, or we could continue to repair the world, and that’s what we have been doing,” she said.

The family’s “Blaze it Forward” kindness campaign has more than 26,000 followers on Facebook and has opened its first club at Newport-Harbor High School in Newport Beach, she said. Newport Harbor was the site of an anti-Semitic incident earlier this year involving students gathered around a swastika that they’d created with red cups.

The case of the man accused of killing Bernstein, Samuel Woodward, a former classmate of Bernstein at the Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana, is scheduled for a pre-trial hearing on Friday. Woodward, of Newport Beach, has pleaded not guilty. He faces a murder charge with enhancements for use of a deadly weapon and the hate crime designation. Both enhancements could increase the sentence if the case results in conviction.

If the Bernstein case ends as a hate crime conviction it would be part of a trend. Last year, the number of LGBT victims in Orange County jumped from two to 11, while some 16% of all local hate crimes targeted people in the LGBT community, according to the report.

But sexual orientation wasn’t the biggest category in this year’s report.

Some 42% of the hate crimes reported in the county last year were motivated by “the target’s race, ethnicity and/or national origin,” according to the report. The next biggest category, 34%, included hate crimes motivated by religious intolerance.

While the report tracked a long-term rise in hate crimes, overall, the data also show a rise in anti-Semitism.  Last year, Jewish people accounted for 13% of all hate victims in Orange County, according to the report.

“It’s a reflection of what’s happening in Orange County, across the United States and the world,” said Peter Levi, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League chapter in Orange County and Long Beach.

“We have seen an increase in anti-Semitism since 2016 and a marked increase since 2018,” said Levi, who attended Thursday’s meeting.

Acts of anti-Semitism in Orange County last year included vandalism at Congregation Beth Jacob in Irvine, which alarmed the community because it took place three days after a man walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and killed 11 people. More recent incidents involving Garden Grove students engaged in Nazi salutes didn’t make it into the hate crime numbers from 2018 because those accounts were not reported until this year, county officials said.

“What’s egregious is not just the sheer volume but the normalization of these incidents, and how they’ve become a regular part of teens’ experiences in schools,” Levi said after the meeting.

“What gets reported to the schools, or organizations that track these incidents, is a tiny tip of the iceberg.”

The next biggest targets of hate in Orange County last year were Latinos and people from Middle Eastern communities, each group accounting for 6% of the county’s hate crime victims, the Human Relations Commission reported.

Overall, the Orange County Human Relations Commission report notes that its findings differ from numbers provided by the California Department of Justice, which found a 2.5% decrease of local hate crimes in 2018. The discrepancy came because the county – unlike the state – includes reports from schools and colleges, county officials said.

The rise in hate crime arrests is leading to more hate-related prosecutions.

Last year, the Orange County District Attorney was asked to consider 32 cases, eventually filing charges in 25 of those cases (three others are pending), according to the report. A year earlier, the DA filed 17 hate crimes, and in 2016 the office filed 12 such cases.

Hate crimes are defined as criminal acts motivated by gender, nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation or disability. The most commonly reported hate-based criminal offense in the county last year was vandalism, at 21%, followed by simple assault, 13%, according to the report.

Hate incidents are marked by behavior that is motivated by hate or bias, but don’t rise to the level of a crime. These often include incidents that are protected as free speech under the First Amendment, yet express intolerance.  Examples include distributing racist fliers in a public place or displaying anti-gay signs at a parade or funeral.

Staff writer Sean Emery contributed to this report.