Hate crimes have increased in the United States since Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the U.S.
There was a 20 percent increase of hate crimes in the nation’s largest cities with populations over 250,000 in 2017, according to official police reports analyzed by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. The center reported 827 incidents in their research.
Members of the LGBTQ community have been victims of deadly crimes. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) reported 52 LGBTQ-targeted homicides in 2017, or one per week. The report showed the number alone was an 86 percent increase from individual reports from 2016. There were 28 homicides in 2016, and 71 percent of the people affected were people of color, white 58 percent affected were black, 8 percent were Latinx, 4 percent were Asian and 2 percent were Native American.
Despite the recent uptick of hate crimes toward LGBTQ people during Trump’s presidency, he was supportive of the LGBTQ community during his campaign. Trump even showed his support of the LGBTQ community by holding a rainbow flag with “LGBTs for Trump” written on it during a campaign rally at the University of Northern Colorado in October 2016.
“As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” Trump said after the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando when 49 people were killed.
Robert Byrd, professor at the Department of Journalism and Strategic Media at the University of Memphis, said some hate crimes have been reported incorrectly, like reporting the wrong gender for a crime committed against a transgender person.
“It hasn’t been until recently that people were able to correct the gender on their birth certificates and state-issued identification, so now a crime against a transgender person may actually be reported correctly,” Byrd said.
Aram Goudsouzian, the chair of the Department of History at the U of M, said he notices the president’s actions influence some of these people to commit hate crimes, like when Trump did not condemn white supremacists after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017.
“If the President of the United States is referring to white supremacists as ‘fine people,’ even in the immediate aftermath of the murder of an innocent protester, then it emboldens the hateful, racist and violent people among us to act on their worst impulses,” Goudsouzian said.
Goudsouzian has seen a negative impact for some students in campuses across the country.
“College is a time when students are exposed to new ideas and should engage in serious intellectual inquiry,” Goudsouzian said. “They should not be subject to violence based on their identity.”
Eddie Yancey, a learning and educational specialist at the U of M, said the hate crime increase is an unfortunate sign for the future.
“Basically, hate is like apple pie,” Yancey said. “It’s a part of the American fabric. Historically speaking, the right or wrong person, or people, has to die. Other than this, hate crime is too lucrative to eradicate, figuratively and literally.”
