Hate crimes are trending up in California including in San Diego. Few are prosecuted.

Reports of hate crimes have been on the rise in California since 2014, increasing by 160% statewide in the nine year period. And in the past three years alone, more than 5,800 hate crime events were reported by law enforcement to the state’s Department of Justice. 

They include 319 in San Diego County alone, according to a recently released state hate crimes report. 

But how many alleged hate crimes actually result in convictions? Far less in many counties across the state, including locally, according to the state data released in late June.

From 2021 through 2023, prosecutors across San Diego County communities won convictions for 25 hate crimes – or one for every 13 cases law enforcement reported in that timeframe. That’s better than most other large counties in the state and better than statewide, which had one conviction for about every 33 cases law enforcement reported. 

Comparing the cases reported to conviction numbers gives insight into the scale of the problem and how often prosecutors prevail. But the report cautions that the convictions any given year could stem from cases filed in previous years.

It’s also true that law enforcement agencies only send prosecutors a fraction of alleged hate crime incidents. Of the 5,800 cases reported across the state in 2021 to 2023, law enforcement sent prosecutors about a third of them for review. 

Several factors influence these decisions. For example, law enforcement might find that some of the cases initially reported as hate crimes weren’t hate motivated or didn’t include a crime at all. 

Some cases may not move forward because law enforcement hasn’t made an arrest. Other factors include the strength of a law enforcement agency, local policies and whether law enforcement officers have been trained to identify hate crimes. 

Ashley Nicholes, a spokesperson for the San Diego Police Department, gave the following example to explain how an alleged hate crime might not be pursued as such: 

“This may occur when we receive a case in which hate speech may be used in a dispute. These cases are logged as potential hate crimes due to their sensitivity; however, they may ultimately not end up being found as hate-motivated crimes. The motivating factor between the two parties is usually another reason that caused the disturbance, not race, religion, sexual orientation, or disability,” Nicholes said.

Toward the end of the year in 2023, San Diego saw there was an increase in First Amendment-protected speech incidents, Nicholes said, adding, “Many of the hate crimes reported were speech-related incidents where someone used name-calling or some type of slur, but it did not result in a crime being committed. Many of these cases were reported as ‘threats’; however, when investigated, the speech did not meet the elements of a crime or, subsequently, a hate crime.”

The rise of hate crimes has been on the radar of local and statewide officials. In July in San Diego, San Diego police increased surveillance in Hillcrest, an historic LGBTQ+ community. The police chief cited a recent uptick in crimes there as the reason for his decision, which was criticized by some residents and privacy advocates.  

Also in response to trends, in May of last year, the California Civil Rights Department launched CA vs Hate, a new multilingual statewide hotline and online portal aimed at helping people targeted by hate acts. Through the hotline, anyone can report a hate incident anonymously. The initiative was a response to a significant rise of hate crimes across California in recent years. After one year, the hotline has received 1,020 reports of hate incidents. 

The most common reasons reported by victims are discriminatory treatment (18.4%), verbal harassment (16.7%), and derogatory names or slurs (16.7%). 

In the previous three years, hate incidents reported by law enforcement across California were targeted mostly at race or ethnicity. According to the data from the California Department of Justice, more than 60% of hate crimes reported were related to race. The second- and third-most cited incidents involved sexual orientation and religion, at 19% and 16% of total crimes reported, respectively. 

Statewide, from 2014 to 2023, incidents of antisemitism grew by 261%, more than any other single motivating factor for hate incidents reported. 

Explore how San Diego and other California counties stack up in terms of hate crime incidents reported to the state by law enforcement agencies and how many are prosecuted each year. Keep in mind that a single incident could include multiple offenses, victims and suspects, and the data consists of cases from both district and city attorneys for each county.