According to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, incidents of bias-motivated crimes have increased by 50% since 2015. According to Dr. Yohuru Williams, founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative (RJI) at the University of St. Thomas, these crimes can range from graffiti to physical violence, as Minnesota's bias-motivated criminal statute is very broad. Since last year, there have been 238 incidents, with 40% of them targeting African Americans, 21% targeting people in the LGBTQIA community, and 9% in the Jewish community.
From the article: "These numbers should be concerning to us because the assumption is we were moving in the right direction ... we have to go deeper in terms of this engagement and think about really fundamentally altering the way that people think about the value of diversity in our community," Williams said.
