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Hate crimes in NYC doubled in 2021, over a third of them against Jews

The total so far is 183 complaints filed for antisemitic incidents out of 503 overall, a whopping 36%.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The New York Police Department came out Tuesday with its hate crimes statistics for the year to December 5 and the news is not good for the Jews.

Out of 503 recorded complaints, 183 of them involved anti-Jewish bias – a whopping 36.4%. This, when the Jewish population the city is approximately 12% of the total, as per 2016 statistics.

Unsurprisingly, fully 85 of the incidents occurred in the second quarter of 2021, coinciding with May’s Operation Guardian of the Walls against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which launched thousands of rockets at Israel altogether. Jews in many places were attacked and threatened by pro-Palestinian mobs or individuals as a result, with New York City featuring prominently at the time.

This is more than a 50% rise in antisemitic crime over 2020, when the official NYPD report had 116 complaints with anti-Jewish bias. However, last year there were also much fewer general hate crimes recorded, a total of 265, which means that an eye-opening 43.7% of them were against Jews.

ABC News reported that police are now often seen on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood of Brooklyn where a large ultra-Orthodox community lives. It has suffered recently from a spate of attacks on children who looks obviously Jewish, some as young as three years old.

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The report showed a picture of three young African-American women walking in the street who police suspect of carrying out most of those specific attacks.  The Anti-Defamation League has posted a $10,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest in these cases.

In the general population, the biggest jump from last year in hate crimes occurred against Asians, who have suffered a huge jump from 28 cases in 2020 to 129 cases in 2021, a rise of 361%. Anti-gay cases rose 193%.

The police are taking the spike seriously.

While the hate crimes overall are up about 100% over last year, police say that so are arrests. The ABC report said that about half of the cases “have been cleared,” although it is unclear how many of those arrested are eventually charged or sentenced in a court of law.

In the United States in general, hate crimes are at their highest level in 12 years, with 7,759 reported in 2020, an increase of 6% over the year before, according to the FBI.