[H]ate crime incidents reported by law enforcement agencies in Vermont are at the highest level since 1995, the earliest year for which Federal Bureau of Investigations statistics are available, according to a report released Tuesday.
Vermont law enforcement reported 34 incidents in 2017, compared to 25 in 2016. The total number was just eight in 2015 — marking a four-fold increase in two years.
Julio Thompson, the director of the civil rights unit of the attorney general’s office, said the continued upward trend since the 2016 election is concerning even though the trajectory is slowing down.
“What we saw for 2016 was the numbers went up by multiple factors. But this year it didn’t go up by multiple factors,” Thompson said. “That’s not good enough, but it is not as significant as before.”
The most hate crime incidents reported in Vermont in a single year before 2017 was 32 in 2005.
In the new new report, 18 of the 34 hate crime incidents in Vermont were attributed to the victim’s race. Six were based on religion, eight on sexual orientation, and three on disabilities.
Thompson said in the last two years across the country, more people have become emboldened to commit hate crimes but that there has also been an increase in people reporting such incidents.
“We may be seeing both of those factors in Vermont,” Thompson said.
The resignation this year of Kiah Morris, the only black woman in Vermont’s Legislature, partly over racist abuse in the past two years, has sparked a debate in Vermont over how one of the nation’s whitest states treats minorities.
Other incidents and events have highlighted the issue: students at UVM led a series of protests last year demanding changes to how the school deals with diversity and organizers of a summer camp in Stowe said campers were the target of racial slurs.
Yet Vermonters’ opinions remain mixed on the presence of racism in the state.
In a recent VPR-Vermont PBS poll, 40 percent of poll respondents said more needs to be done to address racist attitudes in Vermont, but 13 percent responded that “too much” was being done to bring attention to racial issues and 16 percent said racism was not a problem at all in Vermont.
Nationally, the F.B.I. report found the number of reported hate crimes increased about 17 percent in 2017, compared with the previous year—a total of 7,175 hate crimes were reported in 2017, up from 6,121 in 2016.
Of those hate crime incidents across the country, 59.6 percent were a result of race, 20 percent to do with religion, and 16 percent were based on sexual orientation, according to the report.
The number of hate crime incidents targeting Jews increased by 37 percent from 2016 — with 938 incidents — and race or ethnic-based hate crime jumped by 18 percent, with a total of 4,131 incidents. Hate crimes targeting black people also increased by 16 percent in 2017, with 2,013 incidents.
The report does not break down what specific groups were targeted in Vermont.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes across the country, said 2017 was the third worst year on record for hate crimes in the U.S. since 1992, when the F.B.I. started keeping track (data for 1992-1994 were not available on the agency’s website).
Brian Levin, Director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, attributed the rise in incidents to a lack of leadership from President Donald Trump.
“There is a line that wouldn’t be crossed with regards to over-the-top bigotry, which apparently no longer exists,” Levin said, according to the law center.
