THE ABSOLUTE BRIGHTNESS OF LEONARD PELKEY BACKSTAGE GUIDE 13 motivated crimes by the race of the victim. Anti-black violence was the most common type of hate crime in 2018 in all of those cities. Crimes motivated by race or ethnicity, less specifically, were the top type of hate crime in Houston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, while crimes motivated by bias against gay men and lesbians were the most common type in Seattle and Sacramento, and the second-most-common type in cities that included Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and San Francisco. Crimes against Jews were also common — the third-most- common type in Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston, which are the second-, third- and fourth-most-populous cities in the nation, respectively. In the most populous city (with by far the largest Jewish population), New York City, anti- Semitic crimes were more than four times as common as any other type of hate crime in the city: a total of 189 crimes during the year. “What we see with people who commit hate crimes, they don’t specialize in one group. They feel that there are people who shouldn’t be here and they’d like to get rid of them from our communities, and they will attack anyone,” said Jack McDevitt, the director of the Institute on Race and Justice at Northeastern University in Boston. “They may go looking for someone who’s Latino, and if they don’t find someone, they’ll look for someone who’s Jewish. All groups appear to be experiencing increases.” McDevitt blamed the increase on multiple factors, including heated words about immigrants and minorities from political leaders. “This is heard by some haters as permission to go ahead and act,” he said. He added that the ease of finding hateful beliefs online can fuel people to act violently. James Nolan, a West Virginia University sociologist who studies hate crimes, said he found this study’s results convincing, although hate crimes are difficult to track and often inconsistently categorized. “We found this basically everywhere. Hate crimes are up for the country. And it really corresponds with the heated political rhetoric around the 2016 election,” he said. The Rev. Thomas Bowen, the director of the D.C. mayor’s Office of Religious Affairs, said that as the number of hate crimes in the city climbed, he has developed a protocol for responding when a vulnerable religious or racial community is targeted. He makes sure, for example, that it is not just graffiti that gets cleaned up when a house of worship is vandalized; police officers and civic volunteers stop by to talk with congregants to ensure they feel safe. “These incidents definitely do not reflect on who we are as the District of Columbia, and it definitely doesn’t reflect on a majority of residents in Washington, D.C. . . . What we value is love and our neighbors,” Bowen said. This graph from The Washington Post illustrates the number of annual hate crimes by category in Washington D.C. Source: Metropolitan Police Department (edited from WashingtonPost.com)