Last Thursday, the Portland police released information about a terrible beating of a man perceived to be gay in SE Portland, so I got the police stats on hate crimes reported annually in Portland.
According to this year’s figures, violence against people because of their gender or sexual orientation are far outpacing reports of racial or ethnically-motivated hate crimes. That’s interesting. The Q Center, police, and Attorney General’s office made a big push in the LGBT community last spring to get LGBT folks to report crimes against them, so that could explain some of the difference—it could easily be that the actual number of hate crimes occurring in the city is staying about the same, while LGBT people are becoming more likely to report them.
Check out the graph:
“According to this year’s figures, violence against people because of their gender or sexual orientation are far outpacing reports of racial or ethnically-motivated hate crimes. That’s interesting.”
But the absolute number of gender/orientation bias crimes pretty much is unchanged since last year, and shows the least variation. The real question is what happened to race/color crimes in 2010? Obviously 2010 isn’t over. Is there some seasonal effect with crimes against minority races?
The police went ahead and picked up the slack on the crimes against racial minorities. That’s just not reflected in the statistics.