With a polarizing presidential election in 2024, hate crimes in Orange County may have spiked to the highest level in a decade, according to a new report.
The O.C. Human Relations Commission recently released its “2024 Orange County Hate Crime Report,” which charted 119 hate crime events, a statistic that accounted for roughly 6% of the statewide share.
Relying solely on law enforcement data, the report acknowledges that its findings do not “encompass all hate activity in O.C.” as hate crimes typically are underreported.
The report also cannot definitively state the new statistics represent an increase from 2023, as four law enforcement agencies in the county submitted incomplete data that year.
“Hate incidents” are not included. Prior to 2023, those statistics used to highlight prejudice-motivated acts — like distributing hate fliers or using racist epithets — that are not otherwise criminal.
The decision to rely on law enforcement reporting only, while not including hate incident data, drew criticism from nonprofits that collaborated on past hate crime reports.
“It’s very limited data,” said Amr Shabaik, legal director for the Council of American-Islamic Relations’ greater Los Angeles chapter. “It’s not going to capture the multitude of incidents that people still experience and have a negative impact on our local communities.”
An O.C. Grand Jury report released last year echoed such concerns.
Jurors questioned why a commission ad hoc committee had decided to go back to the drawing board on defining hate incidents, “given that the [Department of Justice] established a widely accepted definition of hate incidents in 1990, which has already been adopted by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and local law enforcement agencies.”
In 2024, county supervisors decided not to renew a contract with Groundswell, a nonprofit formerly known as OC Human Relations that helped prepare the commission’s annual hate crime reports.
Last January, the board cut the commission down to seven members while limiting their meeting schedule to four times a year.
Irvine Rabbi Rick Steinberg called 2025 a “building” year for the annual hate crimes report during the commission’s most recent quarterly meeting in November.
“We’re trying to clean it up and make it as accurate as possible,” he said.
The total number of reported hate crimes in 2024 is the highest in a decade, but past numbers have been revised because of a change in how such data is collected.
When the county contracted with Groundswell, 162 hate crimes were charted in the 2022 report, a tally that has since been revised down by 50 incidents.
Asked previously about the discrepancy, a county spokesperson noted that hate crimes are only charted using available and validated data from the state Department of Justice, which includes information submitted by 41 law enforcement agencies in O.C., as well as the O.C. district attorney’s office.
Some trends remain consistent through the changes. Even though Black people comprise just 2.3% of O.C.’s population, the 2024 report logged them as the most frequent victims of hate crime events. Anti-Jewish attacks followed closely.
Racist attacks accounted for over half of all reported hate crime events.
The report charted seven anti-Arab and anti-Islamic hate crime events, a statistic that Shabaik said does not align with CAIR-LA’s work.
“It’s not representative of what our community is facing,” he said. “It’s not representative of the increase in reports that we received from community members.”
Even so, Shabaik added that the report, with all his concerns over methodology, suggests that hate is rising in O.C.
Irvine, which often prides itself as one of the safest cities of its size in the country, emerged from the report with 19 reported hate crime incidents, the most for any single O.C. jurisdiction.
Irvine Police Chief Michael Kent, who also serves as a commissioner, explained in a quote included in the report that the statistics reflect the work his department has done to build community trust as opposed to the city being a hate crime hot spot.
“We know that hate crimes and hate incidents are underreported across the nation,” Kent said. “Our residents feel safe coming forward because we have built open lines of communication and strengthened community partnerships through ongoing outreach and engagement.”
Huntington Beach had the second-most hate crime events with 12 tallied.
Across the county, whites are the most identified suspects of hate crime events at 30%, followed by Latinos. Only one anti-white bias-motivate attack was charted in the report.