Hate crimes are up this year in many large cities across California and the U.S., but Long Beach has shown a particularly pronounced increase by comparison, according to researchers at Cal State San Bernardino who track reported hate crimes.

There have been 12 hate crimes reported through August this year in Long Beach, according to numbers provided by the Long Beach Police Department.

There were only nine such reports in all of 2016, and at this point last year, there were only three, police records show.

There were 12 in all of 2015, according to police.

“The rise in hate crimes in Long Beach reflects an overall trend that we’re seeing in nearly every jurisdiction that we have data for,” said Professor Brian Levin, who directs CSUSB’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. “Long Beach’s increase is more dramatic, but it still fits well within a trend that we’re seeing for 2017.”

Levin’s data set includes 13 large cities across the U.S. from which he’s been able to get numbers for varying portions of this year.

New York City, Chicago, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Portland and Cincinnati all saw increases in hate crimes in the early parts of 2017, Levin said.

Neighboring Los Angeles was also up as of the end of July with 161 reported hate crimes, a 12.6 percent increase over the same time the prior year according to Levin’s data.

Overall, hate crimes in the municipalities were up about 20 percent, according to Levin.

The city with the next steepest incline behind Long Beach was Portland, which went from three reports to nine reports in the first quarter of the year.

A couple of cities, Columbus, Ohio and Riverside, saw decreases.

Levin said many cities experienced a jump in reports around the end of 2016 that bled into the beginning of 2017.

“We saw these election-time spikes,” Levin said.

In Long Beach, for instance, there were three hate crimes reported in November and December followed by six in January alone, according to police data.

Three of those January hate crimes were bomb threats phoned into Jewish community centers or synagogues in Long Beach, police said.

Authorities said they believe two of those three crimes were part of a larger wave of bomb threats that were called into hundreds of Jewish groups across the country.

In March, authorities arrested an 18-year-old Jewish man suspected of making the threats from Israel.

But even before that arrest, hate crime reports began tapering off somewhat in Long Beach with two in February, one in April, two more in June and another one in August, police data shows.

According to Levin, local, nation and international news can drive sudden increases that quickly drop off.

“With catalytic events like terrorist attacks and elections, the spikes tend to be dramatic but short-lived,” he said.

Long Beach police said they don’t know yet if the nation’s political climate or national events had any effect on the local bump in hate crimes.

“I think that it’s too early for us to say that the modest — the extremely small — spike that we have is attributed to anything like that,” Long Beach police Deputy Chief Richard Conant said.

Long Beach police received eight reports of hate crimes in the first two months of 2017. Since then, there have been only four, but all of them have been violent.

Most of the recent attacks have targeted victims for their sexuality or gender identity.

Authorities provided brief descriptions of each crime to the Press-Telegram:

• On April 29, a man was seriously wounded when four people attacked and stabbed him around 5:55 p.m. along Long Beach’s downtown oceanfront near 700 E. Shoreline Drive. Police said they believe the attack was racially motivated and gang-related. One adult suspect and three juvenile suspects have been arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon with hate crime enhancements, police said.

• On June 8, three men stabbed two other men around 2 p.m. in Belmont Shore near 2nd Street and Bayshore Avenue. The two men told police they believed they were targeted because of their sexual orientation.

• On June 22, a man was hospitalized after another man hit him in the head with some unknown object around 2:25 p.m. in Downtown Long Beach near the 700 block of W. Ocean Boulevard. He told investigators he believe he was targeted because of his sexual orientation, police said.

• On Aug. 9, a man attacked a transgender woman in the Wrigley neighborhood near the 600 block of W. Pacific Coast Highway around 2:41 p.m., police said. The woman suffered minor injuries to her upper body. She told police she believes the man attacked her because she identifies as female.

Conant said one way Long Beach police can preemptively fight hate crimes is with knowledge.

He said the department tries to keep officers and residents informed if there are current events or other situations that could cause tensions that would motivate acts of hate or bias.

“We educate internally and externally and we keep our officers in our community well informed of events and activities so that tension is lessoned,” Conant said. “It’ll never go away, but it is certainly lessened by having that knowledge.”

After the bomb threats early this year, Long Beach police reached out to groups they thought could be vulnerable to attacks or misplaced retaliation.

“Not only did we talk to our Jewish community, but you have to think about what is the motivation behind efforts like this, and it’s to incite,” Conant said.

Conant said the department reached out to local synagogues to brief them on the situation but also spoke with members of Long Beach’s Muslim community.

“We wanted to make sure that they understood what was happening out there and that the police department was working on it, and we want to make sure that they know we’re not going to allow them to become scapegoats in these types of events, which are an obvious attempt at spreading hate and fear,” Conant said.

Conant said regardless of whether reports are up or down in a given year, the department is always looking for ways to strengthen its enforcement and prosecutions around hate crime laws.

“I know that this police department, when we look at what it is that we go for, I think what we do is we target hate-related activities. We target hate speech and we’re also targeting gang members who may have a hate overtone in their activities,” Conant said. “I think that we’re very aggressive in our approach to things.”