THUNDER BAY – Thunder Bay tops the charts in Police Reported Hate Crimes. The report released today by Statistics Canada shows that the number of hate crimes, in 2015 reported to police is up.
The news is another piece of bad news for the City of Thunder Bay where incidents of young people coming to the city for school or medical treatment and ending up dead in the rivers is becoming national news.
The highest rate of police-reported hate crime among CMAs in 2015 was recorded in Thunder Bay (22.3 per 100,000 population). The rate of police-reported hate crime in Thunder Bay was mostly the result of 10 incidents against Aboriginal populations, which accounted for 29% of the total anti-Aboriginal hate crimes reported in Canada in 2015.
The report suggests that the high hate crime rate in Thunder Bay was influenced by the introduction of a hate crime awareness campaign in 2012.
While Police reported Hate Crimes rose by 5% in Canada in 2015, largely due to an increase in incidents targeting certain religious and ethno-cultural groups, specifically the Muslim population and Arabs or West Asians. For the year, police reported 1,362 criminal incidents that were motivated by hate in Canada, 67 more than the previous year.
Females were more likely to be victims in incidents targeting a religion, and the presence of female victims in violent crimes motivated by hatred of a religion increased in 2015. That year, 53% of these victims were female, compared with 40% in 2014. The increase in female victims of religious hate crimes is attributed to an increase in female victims for Jewish and Muslim hate crimes from 2014 to 2015.
