Amol Sinha vividly remembers the first time he felt targeted for his race, because it was on an elementary school field trip.
A classmate, he recalled, “pushed me to the ground, punched me in the face, spit in my face and called me the N-word.”
Sinha, the son of Indian immigrants and now the head of the New Jersey chapter of the ACLU, said he was left traumatized — and confused.
“Clearly, this child did not know the meaning of the word he said,” Sinha said during a summit Tuesday on hate crimes and bias incidents at the Rutgers University Newark campus. “Clearly, he had learned hate at some point in his life, very early on.”
State leaders including Gov. Phil Murphy say they are increasingly alarmed by a spike in reported hate crimes and bias incidents in New Jersey, which have been on the rise for the last three years. They were also concerned about rising reports of bias incidents among young folks.
They called for better collaboration between law enforcement and minority groups and — citing a spate of recent hate-fueled shootings — a tightening of New Jersey’s already stringent gun laws.
The Rutgers summit, convened by acting Attorney General Matthew Platkin, brought together state leaders, law enforcement, civil rights groups and clergy to discuss the data, which climbed by 29% in 2020 to 1,447 total incidents.
Platkin on Tuesday also ordered every county prosecutor in the state to hold a meeting on bias incidents in their jurisdiction.
Part of the spike may be due to the fact that hate crime data in New Jersey and around the country has been historically unreliable and, experts say, it’s likely that incidents have been undercounted. But New Jersey overhauled its guidelines for how departments investigate and report hate crimes in 2019, and Murphy noted that part of the rise is due to people being more willing to report crimes against ethnic and religious minorities or gay and transgender people.
“If our numbers are increasing — in part because of this willingness to step forward — that begs the question: How many previous acts have gone unreported and how many of our fellow New Jerseyans suffered silently at the hands and mouths of their tormentors?” Murphy said.
For young people especially, the governor said, “answering this question gives me chills.”
Hate crimes and bias incidents are rising nationally, though it is difficult to compare New Jersey’s numbers with other states because, overall, bias incident reporting remains inconsistent across jurisdictions.
Over a series of panels, authorities and advocates cited a number of causes.
The pandemic sparked anti-Chinese rhetoric linking China to the spread of coronavirus, which spilled over into attacks on Asians of many nationalities, they said. Protests against police violence in Black communities were met with backlash, and the FBI reports that far-right and white supremacist group activity is growing increasingly brazen. In politics, the othering of opponents as “enemies” has caused an increasingly tribal and fractured discourse in recent years, they said.
Here in New Jersey, there was the horrific 2019 mass shooting at a Jewish grocery store by radical Black nationalists. The mayor and police chief in Clark were caught on tape using racial slurs. And, the head of Garden State Equality noted, the killing of at least two transgender women in Newark in recent years.
“There is a foul mood permeating the United States, and the state of New Jersey is not shielded from that foul mood,” said Lt. Gov. Shiela Oliver, the highest-ranking Black woman to hold office in the state.
“I think there is one factor that promulgates it, and that factor is ignorance,” she said.
Anti-Black bias was cited as a motivation for 877 reported bias incidents in 2021; anti-LGBTQ bias in 373 and anti-Jewish in 347. Anti-Asian bias was cited in 129 cases — significant rise from 2019, before the pandemic, which saw just 39.
The number of cases reported in schools also climbed from 96 in 2020 to 207 in 2021, as students returned to in-person learning.
The specter of a recent spate of mass shootings across the country loomed large over the summit. Several speakers, including Murphy — the current vice chairman of the National Governors Association — linked the fight against hate crimes to efforts in Trenton to further tighten New Jersey gun laws.
The governor noted that the vast majority of cases in New Jersey amounted to verbal harassment. He called for a strengthening of “smart and strong gun safety laws which have made us a national model.”
“I fear for what could have been had weapons of war been as readily available in New Jersey as they are in other states,” Murphy said.
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S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com.
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