The number of hate crimes reported to police in the largest U.S. cities fell last year, an unprecedented and unexpected decline in an election year, when experts predicted such crimes would increase, say preliminary data from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University reports USA Today.
At least 3,268 hate crimes were reported across 42 major cities including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Portland, Ore., Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia last year, a decrease of about 2.7% from 2023's record high.
The report found the 10 most populous cities saw an even larger decline, but anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim incidents continued to rise amid the Israel-Hamas war.
"This is the first time since modern record keeping started in '91 nationally, that an election year was down, but we had an unusual increase the year before, because of an unexpected international conflict," said the university's Brian Levin, founder of the center.
Hate crime reports have been on the rise in the U.S. over the past decade, and experts had warned they would likely continue to rise in 2024.
Unlike in 2016 when there was an "explosion" of hate crimes in the month before the election, some major cities saw a "significant decline" in hate crimes in the last months of 2024, Levin said. This may have happened because some people felt emboldened to express bigotry in ways that wouldn't be a crime, especially as social media platforms loosened curbs on hate speech.
"I think a lot of people were expressing their prejudice in other ways, at rallies or online, and venting their frustrations," Levin said.
It's not clear the decline will persist. The number of people killed by extremists in the U.S. this year already has exceeded last year's total and is expected to rise, says the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.