Chicago hate crimes remain high after recent spike, city report shows

After nearly quadrupling in just three years, Chicago’s hate crime levels remain high, city leaders said Thursday.

The number of reported hate crimes has spiked from just 80 in 2020 to 303 last year, aldermen learned during an annual presentation. Meanwhile, the number of reported hate crimes this year is on track once again to end up far above the roughly 60 the city experienced most years before the recent spike.

“There is a consensus that in recent years, the number of hate crimes and hate incidents have gone up,” Chicago Commission on Human Relations Commissioner Nancy Andrade told aldermen. “Many of our family, friends and neighbors feel threatened.”

It’s hard to determine what underlies the far-reaching and troubling trend, Andrade said. Global crises, heightened political partisanship, white nationalist propaganda and conspiracy theories have played a part, she said.

“Now, the Israel-Hamas war is driving a sharp increase in antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes and hate incidents,” she said.

There have already been as many antisemitic hate crimes in Chicago in 2024 as there were all of last year, noted the council’s lone Jewish member, Ald. Debra Silverstein, 50th. Hate crimes have hit the heavily Jewish West Ridge neighborhood hardest, she added.

Silverstein accused city leaders of “turning a blind eye” to antisemitism and called on them to “take a clear and unequivocal stand to protect the Jewish population of Chicago.”

She criticized the responses to several actions pro-Palestinian demonstrators have taken that called for an end to Israel’s war effort in Gaza, including protests that have blocked highways, student walkouts and the vandalism last week of Grant Park’s Buckingham Fountain, which was dyed red.

Silverstein also cited “inflammatory social media posts,” an apparent nod to Health and Human Relations Committee Chair Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, 33rd. Last month, Silverstein accused Rodriguez-Sanchez of antisemitism after a private Facebook post from Rodriguez-Sanchez telling friends she was looking for an “anti Zionist pediatrician” for her child became public.

“Antisemitism is sharply spiking in our city and our nation,” Silverstein said. “We all respect the right to free speech and free assembly, but what about the rights of Jewish residents to live free of fear?”

Black and LGBTQ+ Chicagoans have been the targets of the most reported hate crimes after Jewish Chicagoans over the last two years, the report said. Certain types of hate crimes, like assault and battery, are on track to decline this year.

However, hate crimes involving “criminal damage” are already almost past 2023 levels, according to the report.  A December amendment added targeted graffiti as a hate crime and altered the process for removing such graffiti, a change Ald. Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth, 48th, said has led to faster cleanups in her ward.

Ald. Timmy Knudsen, 43rd, flagged legislation he is working on to crack down on the distribution of hateful flyers with new $1,000 fines. His proposal is a response to someone leaving antisemitic flyers attached to rat poison on 80 cars in his ward, he said.

The hateful litter was apparently left by a white supremacist group, Knudsen said. But police told the aldermen they could not take action because the attackers were “staying one hair within the law,” he said.

“So what this stop hate littering ordinance intends to do is move the law over a hair so that we can create a ticket,” he said.

jsheridan@chicagotribune.com