Law enforcement agencies in San Diego County reported 76 hate crimes to the FBI in 2018, down from 95 the previous year, according to a hate crime statistics report released by the federal agency Tuesday.

According to the FBI, local law enforcement agencies reported 43 hate-crime incidents motivated by race and ethnic bias, 16 motivated by religious bias and 17 motivated by sexual orientation bias.

No San Diego County agencies reported hate-crime incidents in 2018 motivated by disability, gender or gender identity bias, according to the FBI report.

In 2017, local law enforcement agencies reported 95 hate-crime incidents to the FBI. That included 50 motivated by race or ethnic bias, 26 motivated by sexual orientation bias, 18 motivated by religious bias and one motivated by gender identity bias.


In late August, an analysis by The San Diego Union-Tribune found 81 hate crimes reported across the county in 2018, down from 101 in 2017 and 98 in 2016.

The Union-Tribune project, which analyzed five years of hate crime data, used records from the San Diego Association of Governments and law enforcement agencies in an attempt to illustrate what kinds of hate crimes occur in the region and where, particularly in light of the hate-motivated shooting at Chabad of Poway in April that left one person dead and three others injured.

Since the Union-Tribune hate crime project was published, San Diego prosecutors charged a 50-year-old man with three counts of battery and a hate crime allegation for allegedly slapping and berating three women wearing hijabs. And earlier this month, a 26-year-old man pleaded guilty to hate crime and assault charges for striking a teenage Syrian refugee who was speaking Arabic on a cellphone while riding a trolley.

Nationwide, law enforcement agencies in 2018 reported 7,120 hate crimes to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, down slightly from the 7,175 hate crime incidents reported the previous year.


Like in San Diego County, of the hate crimes reported across the nation last year, the majority — 59.6 percent — were motivated by racial or ethnic bias. The FBI reported that 18.7 percent of hate crimes were motivated by religious bias, and 16.7 percent by sexual orientation bias.

Gender-identity bias motivated 2.2 percent of the reported hate crimes, disability bias motivated 2.1 percent and gender bias motivated the other 0.7 percent, according to the FBI statistics.

According to the Union-Tribune analysis of hate crimes reported between 2014 and 2018, the largest number of reported incidents targeted members of the LGBTQ community at 119, followed by those against black people at 113, Hispanic or Latino people at 45 and Jewish people at 32.