Oregon Hate Crime: FBI Reports 146 Incidents In State Last Year

PORTLAND, OR – Despite all of the talk in Oregon about being a progressive state where people get along, the latest hate crime statistics from the FBI paint a different picture of life in the state. There were 146 incidents in Oregon in 2017, up from 104 the year before.

While it may have been that there was a substantial increase in hate crime, officials point out that there has also been a large increase in the number of law enforcement agencies in Oregon reporting incidents to the FBI. In 2017, 214 agencies made reports compared to only 170 the year before.

Nearly half of the reported incidents came from one city – Eugene. The city had 72 of the state's reports.

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Portland was in second place with 18 reports of hate crimes.

Ten were on the basis of race/ethnicity, or ancestry, four were on the basis of religion, three based sexual orientation, and one targeted someone based on a disability.

One Portland incident garnered international attention, casting a harsh light on the state's history of racism.

It was May 26 when police say that Jeremy Christian, who is white, started spewing hateful comments at two black teenage girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab, a traditional Muslim headdress.

A group of other white men came to the defense of the teens. Two ended up stabbed to death and third was gravely injured.

"For all of the area's reputation for being progressive, there is also a history of violent white supremacism that has to be taken into account," then-Portland Police Chief Michael Marshman told Patch at the time.

In a twist of fate, the FBI released their report on the 30th anniversary of one of the most notorious racial attacks in the United States in the last 20 years of the 20th Century.

It was Nov. 13, 1988 when three neo-Nazi skinheads beat an Ethiopian graduate student named Mulugeta Seraw to death on the streets of Portland.

Patch photo of the memorial to the people stabbed defending two teens in 2017 via Colin Miner/Patch.