Valerie Dickson’s son was sitting in his car in front of his family home playing Pokémon Go when, she said, a White woman driving through the neighborhood stopped to take photos of him and his car, threatening to call the cops for “making her uncomfortable.”

Dickson’s son, who was 20 years old at the time, told his mother, “She says I don’t belong here,” as he ran back into their home of eight years.

“I told her, you’re going to call the cops and the best case scenario is the cops are going to come out and they’re going to ask my son a lot of questions and make him feel uncomfortable. The worst case scenario is I end up being another Black mother on the news because my son has been shot,” Dickson said. “And somewhere in between, he gets arrested or pulled into the police department and I have to go down and defend his right to play Pokémon Go. Defend his right to just be a Black nerd.”

Since that 2018 incident, the family has moved out of Orange County so Valerie Dickson said she now feels more comfortable describing the experience – and incidents of hate against the Black community continue to be among the most reported. Last year, the Black community was the most targeted population in Orange County when it comes to hate crimes and incidents, according to the 2022 Hate Crimes Report that will be released today, Sept. 21, by the Orange County Human Relations Commission.

In 2022, Black residents made up 2% of Orange County’s population, however, they made up 52% of reported hate crimes and 43% of hate incidents – an incident is considered action motivated by hateful bias that is not a crime.

“Watching my 20-year-old son cry and apologize because he was trying to catch Pikachu. Because he was trying to sit there and be a kid as long as he could be. For him to be threatened with the cops was hard,” Dickson said. “My son never played Pokémon Go in front of our house again. He stopped. He would get in and out of his car as quickly as possible when he got home or when he had to leave. He would not sit in the front or in his car to do anything.”

Dickson said in the time she lived in Orange County her twins were also followed by a man shouting racial slurs as they walked home from school and the Black Lives Matter flags outside her and her neighbors’ homes were torn down multiple times.

There were 450 reported hate crimes and incidents in 2022, and more than half of those were motivated by race, ethnicity or national origin bias, the OC Hate Crimes Report says. It will be presented at a panel this morning in Buena Park. Speakers include Stephanie Van-Dyke Camacho, director of advocacy and education at the LGBTQ Center of OC, Ernesta Wright, executive director of the G.R.E.E.N. Foundation, and Julia Kelley, a student-to-student participant from the Jewish Federation of OC.

Over the last five years, “hate activity has been on a steady incline” in the county, the report says, with hate crimes having increased by 75%, and hate incidents rising by 142%. Compared to 2021, there had been a 126% increase in anti-LGBTQ hate activity reported in 2022; 32% of hate crimes reported in 2022 targeted people based on religion, primarily the Jewish community; and after being the most targeted racial community in 2020, anti-Asian hate has continued with 33 incidents and 12 crimes reported in 2022.

The top reported offenses included vandalism, physical assault and threats of violence. Hate activity offenders were mostly White and mostly male, the report says. When it comes to hate crimes, 47% of offenders were ages 26 to 40. More than half of hate incidents, however, involved youth under the age of 18, and 27% of the hate activity reported in 2022 took place at schools, the report says.

“We talk about children dealing with bullying in schools. Now, that bullying seems to be very much targeted at a racial, gender or sexual orientation identity,” said Dickson, who now works as a diversity, equity and inclusion specialist with Groundswell, formerly known as the OC Human Relations Council.

“The cycle of hate continues because you have to be taught to hate. So if older generations have not learned how to stop hating, then younger generations will learn to hate,” she said. “I think this year we’re seeing an increase in younger people perpetuating hate crimes, hate incidences, because that’s what they’ve seen adults do and nobody has modeled for young folks what it looks like to exist harmoniously with folks who are different than us.”

The Orange County Human Relations Commission, in partnership with Groundswell, a nonprofit contracted by the county, gathers hate activity reports from individuals, law enforcement, school districts, higher-education institutions and community-based organizations. Because the annual hate crime report depends on voluntary self-reporting, it is likely last year’s numbers are under reported, said Norma Lopez, executive director of the county commission.

“There’s a lack of awareness. People don’t know that these instances can be reported, or people know that they can be reported, but are frightened. There’s a lot of reasons for that from mistrusting law enforcement to their own status, feeling like if they call, they might be targeted for being undocumented or that there will be repercussions to them reporting,” Lopez said.

With data in hand, Alison Edwards, Groundswell’s CEO, said the next step is for local leaders and organizations to look at ways to prevent hate activity in the county, whether that is by creating better access to reporting platforms, increasing access to supportive resources or improving community engagement in addressing hate.

“Every year when we look at this data, it’s our job to figure out the activities moving forward. And one of the things that we do year-round, every year, is we convene with nonprofits and community members from across the county in our hate prevention network,” Edwards said. “One of the things that we really want to do is think about things that happen before a hate crime.

“Everyone’s hope is that it never happens, so a lot of the focus in the last year and moving forward has been on what we can do before hate turns into action,” she said. “How can we build programs and relationships that help people see one another as human first, and to see differences as vital, essential and important parts of our community?”

The data helps community leaders know what sort of supportive programs residents need and where they need it. The Orange County Human Relations Commission, according to the report, will collaborate with several local community partners to offer prevention strategies, training and webinars for community members, schools and organizations.

“Hate is a symptom of much bigger systemic issues. And we want to begin to have those conversations because that’s truly how we’re going to combat this,” Lopez said.

Dickson argues community leaders need to name racism, discrimination and hate crimes as a social ill.

“Rather than looking at this as something individuals have to address. Let’s look at it from a community perspective,” she said. “There seems to be a little bit of apathy. A lot of folks are saying, ‘Well, we don’t like it, but there’s not much we can do.’ That is also increasing, this idea that somehow it’s so big that we can’t do anything. And of course, there’s stuff we can do. There’s always something that we can do.”

Hate activity can be reported in multiple ways. Make a report by phone by dialing 2-1-1, by texting “OCHateactivity” to 898211 or by emailing [email protected]. Hate incidents can also be reported to law enforcement, schools or local organizations.

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