It’s not easy for Orange County residents to see where hate crimes and incidents are happening – and increasing – despite an annual report detailing who’s being targeted throughout the county.
There’s a policy reason for that.
Groundswell, formerly known as the OC Human Relations Council, isn’t allowed to disclose where they get their data from for their annual report highlighting hate crimes and incidents, the only centralized report that tracks local hate.
“The data is basically given to us voluntarily. None of the cities or departments are required to do that,” said Allison Edwards, Groundswell’s CEO. “One of the agreements we have is we won’t disaggregate the data.”
Groundswell’s most recent report found over 160 hate crimes took place in Orange County last year, along with another 288 reported hate incidents, which don’t rise to the level of criminal prosecution.
[Read: New Report Shows Hate Crimes and Incidents Continue Increasing in Orange County]
When asked why many cities don’t disclose the data, Edwards said many cities fear the data can be “unintentionally misleading,” because as agencies make more of an effort to track the problem, they find more cases, showing a spike in their number of hate crimes.
“They might appear to have a large increase in hate activity, but it might just be an increase in collecting the data,” Edwards said. “It’s sort of counter intuitive in that way.”
There are no details in the report on where those incidents take place other than the fact they’re in Orange County.
But a report from the California Department of Justice breaks down where 110 hate crimes happened by city, and notes how many victims there were and how many suspects were identified.
The Department of Justice data comes from local police departments, which are legally required to report hate crimes to the state’s top prosecutor.
Groundswell also gathers data from local school districts, cities and direct reports, along with the tracking of hate incidents, which the state report doesn’t handle.
Santa Ana had the highest number of reported hate crimes at 34 last year, followed by Irvine, which had only 20 according to the state report. Huntington Beach was in a distant third place, reporting just nine hate crimes for 2022.
All three cities publish their hate crime statistics online, and are some of the only cities in the county to do so.
That state report also shows that only around 14% of reported hate crimes in Orange County were prosecuted by OC District Attorney Todd Spitzer, with both Spitzer and the state report noting the local prosecutor received 37 cases from local law enforcement.
That means the DA’s office only learned about one in every three hate crimes, according to the state report.
And only one in every five hate crimes made it to the DA’s office, based on Groundswell’s anonymized research.
Orange County isn’t alone in struggling with prosecuting hate crimes – the counties of Los Angeles and San Diego prosecute less than 20% of their reported hate crimes.
In a letter to Groundswell published as part of their annual report, Spitzer’s office said most of the 37 cases were either filed without hate crime charges or were thrown out altogether “due to insufficient evidence.”
The 16 hate crimes that were prosecuted by the DA’s Hate Crimes Unit included crimes motivated by bias against “race, national origin, religion and sexual orientation,” according to that letter.
That’s also a significant increase for the DA’s office, which has prosecuted more than twice the number of hate crimes than in the previous 25 years since Spitzer took over the office in 2019, according to his letter to Groundswell.
The District Attorney’s office did not respond to questions on how they collect hate crime data from local police departments, with spokesperson Kimberly Edds noting the cases they mentioned in the DA’s letter to Groundswell were the only ones they received.
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.
