Hate in Hamilton is on the rise, according to figures pulled from the city’s latest police report.
On Friday, the force said it recorded 220 instances of hate and bias reported to police in 2023 — an uptick of 26 per cent when compared to the year prior.
Seventy-nine of those reports were deemed to be official hate crimes.
READ MORE: Hamilton sees 61% rise in hate-motivated crimes in 2022: police
Leading those calls were incidents of racially driven biases, for a total of 96 reports throughout the region.
Cases of discrimination against a person’s sexual orientation came next, with religious-related intolerance trailing shortly behind.
“Last year, the Black community, the 2SLGBTQIA community and the Jewish community were the groups most frequently victimized,” reads part of the release.
The report also noted that females and multi-gender made up a large portion of those occurrences as well.
“While there was a rise in the number of hate/bias occurrences, the true number is likely much larger since many incidents go unreported.”
Police add that out of all 79 hate crimes, 12 of them involved some form of assault.
Anti-racism advocates in Hamilton have sounded the alarm before about the rise in the disturbing trend but say they are not surprised by the latest numbers.
Police believe the rise is also tied to people knowing where to go to report an incident.
The officers in charge of the paper say they saw a notable increase in crimes related to the theft and destruction of pride flags during international events like the “One Million March for Children” campaign.
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Police say they also saw another increase in hate-related activity in October after the Israel-Hamas war had begun.
“The impact of hate/bias occurrences is felt throughout the entire community,” said Chief Frank Bergen. “These occurrences undermine victims’ feelings of belonging, safety, and well-being, and instill fear across the community.”
Another pitiful finding highlighted by the report was that every instance of religiously-motivated hate that was logged by police in 2023 was targeted either Muslims or Jews.
Of the 59 recorded cases of religious bigotry, 77 per cent of them were graffiti related.
According to police, a hate crime is any criminal offence that has substantial evidence to prove the act was motivated by a discriminating prejudice.
Incidents, on the other hand, lack the necessary proof to demonstrate that they were motivated by prejudice but include hateful overtones.
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“It’s going to take all of us to try and address these issues, and we need to continue to see efforts at all federal, provincial and municipal levels,” said Lyndon George from the Hamilton Anti-Racisism Resource Centre.
“We need to be able to track the data to understand what’s happening and we need to continue to come up with action plans that are going to address them and those are things that are going to have to take an intersectional lens for us to be really honest and transparent about what is happening in our community,” said George.
Detective Constable Lindsay Scott from Hamilton Police said they plan to continue meeting with community members to discuss the increase in hate crimes.
“We are training new recruits on understanding and identifying what a hate crime is, we’ve also developed a dashboard which is in real-time and allows us to collect data to be able to see any trends,” said Detective Constable Scott.
Hamilton police say they are creating a ‘hate crime review team’, where they will consult with six different focus groups on how to address concerns within their communities.
