It’s not your imagination: Hate crimes were up last year — across the nation, state and closer to home.

In 2016, 230 hate crimes were committed in Los Angeles, according to by California State University , San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, up 15 percent over the year before. In Orange County, there were 50 hate crimes, up 13.6 percent over the year before. Of the local communities in the center’s 2016 hate crimes statistics, Long Beach saw a decrease in hate crimes, with eight committed in 2016, down 33 percent from the year before.

Nationally, the center reports 2,173 hate crimes were committed in large cities and counties in 2016, up 6 percent from the year before.

Police data assembled by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino looks at a sample of 25 large cities and counties across the United States, including nine of the 10 most populous cities.

“In 25 major cities and counties throughout the United States for 2016, we found a 6 percent increase,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. “However, in California, it went up 14 percent.”

The cities of San Bernardino and Riverside don’t have the population to be included in the report, but the center’s data show that Riverside County had 9 hate incidents last year, up from eight the year before, a 12 percent increase. San Bernardino had eight hate crimes in 2016, a 100 percent leap from the four incidents in 2015.

And the trend is even more worrying.

“For California, we can confidently state that when the full data is released by the attorney general, that we’ll have the first back-to-back increases since 1996,” Levin said. “Nationally and in California, we’re at multi-year highs, but well-off the record high of 2001. After years of declines, we’re seeing back-to-back increases, so that’s a concern.”

Last year also looks to be the second consecutive year that hate crimes went up faster in California than the rest of the country.

Levin presented the data Thursday in Washington, D.C., at a summit of the Hate Crimes Subcommittee, a subcommittee of the presidential Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety.

“There was a definite election-time spike in places like San Jose, Los Angeles, but also New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Montgomery County, Maryland,” he said. “And the increase in many of these places was dramatic.”

Specifically, hate crimes against gays and Muslims went up right around the November election.

Levin repeatedly noted that these spikes aren’t necessarily all-time highs in hate crimes.

“During the 1980s, in those places that did gather data, we had higher hate crime rates,” he said. “But we don’t have data from many of these places.”

And even now, it’s hard to trust all of the reported data.

“We’re seeing a really uneven response to data collection,” with whole states like Mississippi reporting no hate crimes in 2015.

The center goes beyond police data to survey communities across the country and estimates less than half of actual incidents are reported to the police as hate crimes.

“In places where we have data on incidents, they’re rising faster than official hate crimes,” Levin said. “It’s socially acceptable in many places to be an over the top overt bigot, as long as you’re not committing any crimes.”

Levin said he was pleased by Thursday’s summit, at which Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed to zealously enforce federal hate crime laws he opposed as senator.

“This summit represents a positive first step in what appears to be a sustained effort by the Justice Department to reach out to advocates and subject-matter experts in setting their policy,” Levin said. “If we can continue what started yesterday, this is an important first step.”

Note: This story was updated to clarify that the data cited is the center’s, not the FBI’s, although both draw on similar sources of data.