Hate Crimes Are Up 115 Percent in New York City Since Election Day

The NYPD reports that hate crimes have spiked 115 percent in New York City since election day.

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Since Donald Trump was elected president, hate crimes have made headlines across the country and beyond. Thanks to what the Southern Poverty Law Center calls "The Trump Effect," it's no wonder that Dictionary.com named 'xenophobia' as their word of the year. While hate crimes are occurring around the country, New York City in particular saw a huge spike—115 percent—in hate crimes since Trump won the election, the NYPD reports.

The NYPD says there has been at least 43 bias-related attacks since the election, compared to 20 during the same period of time last year. That's a 115 percent increase. And Mayor Bill de Blasio believes that Trump's rhetoric is partly to blame, according to Politico. "You can’t have a candidate for president single out groups of Americans, negatively, and not have some ramifications for that," the mayor said on Monday. "It's obviously connected to the election." 

While the mayor also said, "We could lose lives because of this," he declined to "directly" blame Trump for the spike in hate crimes. "It’s more more complicated than that. It’s not linear. Do I blame Donald Trump for using hate speech during his campaign? Absolutely. He did. It’s a fact," the mayor told reporters.

Of the 43 hate incidents reported since the election, 24—more than half—have been anti-Semitic, which is three times as many as last November, according to the Observer. Hate crimes against Muslims doubled, from two last year to four this year.

While this month in particular has seen a huge spike in hate crimes, hate crimes for all of 2016 are up 35 percent compared to last year as well. 

Just this weekend, Aml Elsokary, a Muslim off-duty NYPD officer, was threatened by a man who said to her, "ISIS [expletive], I will cut your throat, go back to your country." Within 24 hours, the man was arrested and charged with menacing as a hate crime and aggravated harassment, according to CNN. The incident made Mayor de Blasio "sick to [his] stomach." He said, "This is her country, she is an American, she is a New Yorker, and this is her home. We cannot allow this hatred and bias to spread."

Despite the spike in hate crimes, major crimes are down in New York City overall. According to the New York Daily News, major crimes are down 3.8 percent for the first 11 months of 2016, which has seen more than 100 fewer shootings and 15 fewer murders compared to the first 11 months of last year. Specifically in November, crime dropped 9.9 percent compared to the same month in 2015; there were 8,194 major crimes this November compared to 9,094 last year.

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