Orange County steps gingerly into new era of hate crime reporting ...Middle East

Orange County issued a new, seemingly upbeat report on hate crimes this month, with data showing the first local decline in such crimes in at least seven years.

But many observers – ranging from critics who express distrust of county officials to county officials who say they hope to revive a Human Relations Commission and improve future hate crime reporting – say the new summary is incomplete at best and at worst misleading.

And with the Orange County Board of Supervisors slated to vote Tuesday, Jan. 14 on creating a new Human Relations Commission – a move that will put future hate crime reports under direct control of elected supervisors – leaders in some targeted communities say they fear that the county is politicizing a data-reporting issue that’s become a flashpoint of the culture wars.

“I’m concerned and disappointed” with this year’s report, said Amr Shabaik, legal director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations Los Angeles, which is based in Anaheim.

“People may want to paint a picture that this kind of thing doesn’t exist in Orange County,” Shabaik said. “But that’s not the case.”

The data presented in the County of Orange 2023 Hate Crime Report showed a 15% decline in the number of local criminal acts motivated by bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.

But that is viewed as lacking for two reasons.

First, the 2023 report doesn’t include full-year crime numbers from police in Costa Mesa, Garden Grove, Orange and Westminster, departments that were changing their data reporting systems during the period in question. It’s possible that 12-month reports from those departments would have changed the new data. In 2022, the four departments combined to account for 1 in 6 reported hate crimes in Orange County and in 2023, based on partial reports, they accounted for 1 in 6.

But incomplete data from a handful of police agencies is viewed by critics and others as a one-time problem.

The bigger issue, some argue, is the county’s decision to track only hate crimes and exclude so-called hate incidents, such as racial taunting or derogatory language, that aren’t criminal but are still motivated by underlying bias. In previous years, Orange County has seen dozens to hundreds more hate incidents than it has hate crimes.

Experts say the true measure of hate-related tension in a community is to track both crimes and incidents, and some locals argue by excluding hate incidents the new report offers an unrealistically upbeat picture of bias in Orange County.

Given that issues such as Middle East violence and the rising political tension associated with presidential campaigns were part of the news cycle in 2023, it’s tough to see that as a time for a decline in hate. The Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations, which tracked both crimes and incidents, posted a 45% increase in so-called hate events during the period when hate crime fell by 15% in Orange County.

The disconnect didn’t go unnoticed by county officials.

“I don’t think the data we’ve collected properly reflects the actual, complete situation, no,” said Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley, who represents the county’s fifth district, referring to the latest hate crime report.

“We all know there are other ways people express hate besides crime.”

Foley said hate incidents were excluded from this year’s report because the definition for an incident, as opposed to a crime, sometimes is debatable and can vary depending on the group being targeted or engaging in what might be deemed hateful speech. She added that supervisors also believed some hate incidents were being double counted, creating an imperfect data pool.

Going forward, Foley said, the county’s plan is to include hate incidents in future reports.

“The first mission for the new (Human Relations Commission) is to come up with a set way to define and track incidents,” Foley said. “We need a good methodology for incidents.”

But Shabaik and others say they’re concerned about the process, not just the incomplete results, of the latest hate report.

When the county votes Tuesday to submit members for a new Human Relations Commission, that group will work under new rules. One rule could bar members of the commission from speaking publicly about their work, meaning any findings from the taxpayer-funded department could be filtered by elected county officials.

“I think we’ve just seen why that could be a problem,” Shabaik said.

The 2023 hate report was written by county officials after a June 30, 2024 vote by supervisors, including Foley, to discontinue the county’s $250,000-a-year contract with Groundswell, a local nonprofit that had been producing the county’s annual hate crime reports since the early 2000s – much of that time as the Orange County Human Relations Commission.

Groundswell, which works with governments, schools and companies, among others, to reduce conflict between different groups, based its reports on data from the Orange County District Attorney and on information about incidents gathered and verified by a variety of groups that often are targeted in hate crimes, such as the Anti-Defamation League, the LGBTQ Center of Orange County, Stop Asian and Pacific Islander Hate and Shabaik’s organization, CAIR.

Alison Edwards, chief executive at Groundswell, described the data her group used to define and tabulate hate incidents as “rigorous and consistent.”

“The numbers we collected, year to year, were based on the same criteria, year to year,” Edwards said.

The interest groups contacted by Groundswell would track reports from people in their communities who said they’d been victimized in some way.

At CAIR, Shabaik said, every incident is subject to a two-party verification system — meaning the person taking a report from a community member and a second, independent person from within the organization, must agree about details of an incident, and its intent, before counting it as something to be included in a hate crime report.

That process mirrors the two-party verification system required in California for a police department to categorize something as a hate crime.

Groundswell’s Edwards said other groups also used a similar verification process.

“The community data was a strong part of the reporting,” Edwards said. “We met with organizations every year. I felt like, obviously, the data doesn’t always bring a positive story. But the acknowledgment that it was important was always there.”

Shabaik said he hopes the county will reach out to his group, and others, in a way that’s similar to how he’s worked with Groundswell.

“Hate speech, incidents, impart fear in the community,” he said. “Any move away from tracking them is concerning.”

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