A transgender woman was walking in South Austin early one morning about a year ago when four people got out of a car, yelled that she’s “not a real woman” and slashed her arm with a knife, sending her to the hospital.
A few months later, a 15-year-old African-American girl was picking up a pizza in Bridgeport with others when a white man pelted her with eggs, yelled “f—ing n—ers” and sped away in a pickup truck.
That same month in Lakeview, someone tried to set fire to a synagogue.
Those allegations were detailed in police reports last year, when the number of hate crimes reported in Chicago was higher than any year since at least 2011.
Through mid-November, police had taken 87 hate crime reports. That’s nine more than in all of 2018.
Hate crimes reported against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people were at a recent high. And hate crime reports against Jews continued a yearslong increase.
Jews also were the target of one of the most potentially destructive acts in May, when a man hurled Molotov cocktails at a North Side synagogue in an arson attempt that failed but was captured on security video.
“Watching that on this video recording was like a punch in the gut — to see someone act with such violence toward this building that is such a warm and welcoming place that represents so much love and goodness,” said Rabbi David Wolkenfeld of the Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation.
Human Relations Commissioner Mona Noriega warned aldermen about the uptick in hate crime reports at a hearing about three months ago, but gave little detail.
The Tribune used open records requests to obtain data from 2012 to mid-November, the latest date for which records were available.
An analysis shows that reported hate crimes started to rise during the latter part of the decade: the city averaged 63 a year from 2012-15 and 75 a year from 2016-19. The offenses ranged from serious physical attacks to vandalism motivated by race, sex, religion or other elements of a victim’s identity.
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Kenneth Gunn, first deputy commissioner of the human relations department, attributed the increase in part to better reporting by police and more vigilance among Chicagoans.
“There’s more of an emphasis on it and, I think, just a higher level of awareness,” he said. “We’re not seeing (hate crimes) jumping out of the roof.”
The recent totals are far lower than Chicago’s count during the 1980s and 1990s, according to Chicago Commission on Human Relations records. Police reported 288 hate crimes in 1992, when homicides and other crime surged. During the following decades, the number of reported hate crimes dropped before ticking back up in recent years.
Nationally, FBI data shows that hate crime reports were on a yearslong downward trend until the numbers started rising again in 2015.
In Chicago, there have been 551 hate crimes reported in the last eight years. About half involved assault or battery. The rest ranged from bathroom graffiti to bomb threats. African Americans, Jews or LGBT people were targeted in nearly three-quarters of the cases.
A caveat about the the department’s data: The records show hate crimes that were reported to police, but not every case proved to be a hate crime.
Not unlike other kinds of crime in Chicago, arrests in hate crime cases have been rare. During the last eight years, police made arrests in fewer than 1 in 5 reported hate crimes, the data show.
Convictions on hate crimes charges were rare. Out of 87 cases where police arrested an adult, prosecutors brought charges under the state’s hate crimes statute in 23, according to a Tribune search of Cook County court records. They won hate crimes convictions in eight cases.
In many other cases, prosecutors charged defendants with different offenses and won convictions. They’ve also brought hate crimes charges in cases police did not originally classify as such.
“The evidence must show that a criminal act was committed by reason of the actual or perceived protected status of the victim,” said Tandra Simonton, a spokeswoman for State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx.
Even as hate crime reports were trending up in Chicago, federal authorities criticized police for the way they responded to them.
In a 2017 report, the Justice Department faulted the city for understaffing the civil rights unit tasked with looking into hate crimes. The report cited minority groups’ complaints of a reluctant police response and suggested that as a result, the department had likely undercounted hate crimes.
Still, the Police Department has not increased staffing in the civil rights unit, officials acknowledged.
Following the Justice report, city officials signed a wide-ranging order for court oversight. The Police Department agreed to review and rewrite its policies on hate crimes by Jan. 1 to be sure they are “comprehensively investigated.” The city also vowed to train all officers every two years on identifying and responding to hate crimes.
Police spokesman Luis Agostini acknowledged the department missed its deadline to rewrite the policies, as it has missed dozens of other deadlines set by the court order. New rules have been drafted but not finalized, Agostini said. The department also is working on updating its training on hate crimes, he said.
Last year, law enforcement found at least one crime it concluded was a hoax — the one reported by former “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett, who alleged he was attacked by men yelling slurs and pro-Trump slogans. Police and prosecutors concluded the attack was bogus, but Foxx quickly dismissed charges that he’d staged the episode, spurring a backlash and leading to the appointment of a special prosecutor.
While it’s unclear how many hate crimes are hoaxes, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino estimated that fake reports made up less than a quarter of 1% of reported offenses in 2018.
Asked about hate crime hoaxes in Chicago at the recent City Council hearing, Noriega, the human relations commissioner, referenced Smollett: “I only know of one.”
‘Next thing you know, they gonna gay-bash’
LGBT people have been the target of more reported hate crimes than any group in Chicago over the last eight years: 159.
That also was true last year. The 29 alleged crimes reported as of mid-November nearly doubled the 16 reported in 2018.
Last year’s reported hate crimes included the knife attack on a transgender woman in the South Austin neighborhood on Jan. 3. The victim told officers that around 4 a.m. two females and two males jumped out of a car, and one of them said, “You’re (a) f-g and you are not a real woman,” according to a police report. Then, one of the females took out a knife and sliced the victim’s forearm.
An ambulance took her to the hospital, where she was treated and released. Police suspended the investigation after failing to reach the victim in the days after the crime, the report states. The Tribune could not reach the woman for comment because the department withheld her name, as it generally does with crime victims.
That was one of six anti-transgender offenses reported last year. Trends in crimes against transgender people are hard to track because police only recently started differentiating them from other LGBT-related crimes, according to Noriega.
Over the years, the majority of reported anti-LGBT offenses have been against gay males, who were the reported victims in 13 cases as of late 2019.
Antae Manierre told police about a 2018 confrontation with a customer at his East Garfield Park hot dog shop, Haute Diggity Dawgs. Manierre, who is gay, reported that the argument ended with the customer calling him a “f—-t ass,” according to a police report.
“When you hear that word, you pay attention … because the next thing you know, they gonna gay-bash,” Manierre told the Tribune.
A few hours later, Manierre saw the man outside with what he thought might be an assault weapon, according to a police report. The customer opened fire with what turned out to be a paintball gun, hitting Manierre’s SUV several times, police wrote.
David Curtis, then 21, was charged with criminal damage to property — rather than a hate crime — but prosecutors quickly dropped the charges. Manierre said that’s because he was late for a hearing, and court records appear to back that up.
A state’s attorney spokesperson said in an email that the agency no longer has the case file and declined to comment on Manierre’s account.
Jump in anti-Semitic crimes
Reported hate crimes against Jews have been on the rise in Chicago. Eight or fewer were reported each year from 2012-15, but 12 or more a year have been reported since then.
Last year, there were 18 reported anti-Semitic crimes through mid-November. Three of those, however, were car vandalism cases clustered near synagogues later determined not to be hate crimes, while another one involved a mosque but police had mislabeled it, the Tribune found.
The rise in such reported crimes here has occurred alongside a spate of attacks on the East Coast, including deadly ones.
“The Jews are particularly coming under attack from all sides of the spectrum,” said professor Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and a former New York City police officer.
In Chicago, reported crimes included anti-Semitic phone calls to synagogues, swastika graffiti and the Molotov cocktail attack from May, among others.
Wolkenfeld, the rabbi, said the attempted arson caught on surveillance video was disturbing for members of his congregation, but their response has been “proud defiance.”
He said the congregation made upgrades to security, though he declined to reveal specifics. As scary as the arson attempt was, Wolkenfeld said that “living a proud Jewish life” is worth the risk.
“I think the attack reminded us of just how much we cherished each other and our community,” he said.
These offenses have stoked fear beyond those they directly victimize.
A North Side mother of two said she and her husband told the children they couldn’t put up Hanukkah decorations. The woman, who asked not to be identified because of her safety concerns, told the Tribune her family has a small Jewish scroll decoration on the front door, but the couple opted not to display a more prominent menorah and a decoration containing a Star of David.
“I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, and then I asked my husband and he said given the current climate, he’d rather not draw attention,” she said.
She said she’s never been targeted, but has read the news.
“It’s just this general underlying fear,” she said.
dhinkel@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @danhinkel
![Today’s Highlight in History: On April 24, 1995, the final bomb linked to the Unabomber exploded inside the Sacramento, California, offices of a lobbying group for the wood products industry, killing chief lobbyist Gilbert B. Murray. (Theodore Kaczynski was later sentenced to four lifetimes in prison for a series of bombings that killed three people and injured 29 others.) On this date: In 1877, federal troops were ordered out of New Orleans, ending the North’s post-Civil War rule in the South. In 1915, in what’s considered the start of the Armenian genocide, the Ottoman Empire began rounding up Armenian political […]](https://www.chicagotribune.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/2023/06/12/5LTPEE42BQ2O25ECG7SKBN4RV4.jpg?w=535 "Today’s Highlight in History: On April 24, 1995, the final bomb linked to the Unabomber exploded inside the Sacramento, California, offices of a lobbying group for the wood products industry, killing chief lobbyist Gilbert B. Murray. (Theodore Kaczynski was later sentenced to four lifetimes in prison for a series of bombings that killed three people and injured 29 others.) On this date: In 1877, federal troops were ordered out of New Orleans, ending the North’s post-Civil War rule in the South. In 1915, in what’s considered the start of the Armenian genocide, the Ottoman Empire began rounding up Armenian political […]")
