After New York City recorded a 182% increase in hate crimes in the first month of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty, in January, the New York City Police Department said in February that it was changing the way it reported hate crimes publicly. Even when it shared only “confirmed” but not “reported” hate crimes in the city, Jews turned out to be the targets of 55% of all the hate crimes in the city, some 45 percentage points more than their share of the overall city population.

In March, the NYPD again seesawed, this time sharing both the “confirmed” and “reported” hate crime statistics separately, which made it hard to compare the month to March 2024 and to prior years. Jews remained disproportionately targeted in hate crimes, as they were in the city in April, when they were targeted in 59% of the combined “confirmed” and “reported” hate crimes in the Big Apple.

All of these changes were news to a detective, who is part of the hate crimes task force at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and who asked JNS only to use her last name, Doherty, and not to publish photos of her.

“We don’t have it,” Doherty told JNS.

“People can report whatever they want, but we’re doing an investigation and if it is a hate crime, it’s going to be a hate crime,” she said. “It’s not going to be a ‘reported’ hate crime.”

“You can’t have, ‘Ok, this is a robbery and this is a ‘reported’ robbery,’” she said.

There had been speculation that Mamdani, who has said that he would have the Israeli prime minister arrested in New York City and whose spokeswoman said that synagogues violate international law when they host pro-Isrel events, pressured the NYPD to make the changes. Jessica Tisch, commissioner of the NYPD, has said that it was her choice, not the mayor’s.

JNS spoke to Doherty and five other California law enforcement officers last week at a ceremony, during which they said that they were honored and humbled to receive awards for combating hate from the Anti-Defamation League, at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Doherty told JNS that detectives must prove that there is a bias in hate crime cases.

Detectives do that with “whatever the victim is saying, the suspect’s actions—that’s the first step,” she said. “Whatever the suspect said to the victim. Why did they target them? By that, we can determine if it was a hate crime.”

“Sometimes it’s not very clear and there is further investigation,” she said. “Sometimes it’s very clear, for example a swastika on a synagogue.”

At the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, detectives in each station receive reports of possible hate crimes, which the task force takes over if it’s a “major or notable hate crime,” Doherty told JNS.

Police can only determine a suspect’s motivation after the person is arrested. “Was he motivated by hate? Was he motivated by a random act of violence?” she said. “So all of that comes to play during the investigation.”

Doherty wouldn’t discuss specifics of ongoing cases that she’s probing but told JNS that she is involved in cases like a current investigation of vandalism at a synagogue in the Los Angeles area.

The county’s human relations commission said, in a December hate crimes report, that anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2024 hit the second highest number that the county had ever recorded.

Doherty told JNS that the task force reviews hate crime statistics in the county monthly and it’s too early to know if trends have improved.

Only around “midyear can you predict actual trends,” she said. “Jewish community-wise, there is no large increase.”

Robert Luna, sheriff of Los Angeles County, told JNS at the event that he is very proud of his officers, who were honored.

“This is not an 8-to-5 job,” he said. “You’ve got to have a lot of passion to do this. The connection, or collaboration, with the community they work with is extraordinary.”

“You see the different awards, the different incidents that they were working, and it really shows the community how much we care, how much we’re aware and how we respond and investigate things,” he said.

Those who work on hate crimes undergo “very good training” and learn about “current trends and patterns” and have “our finger on the pulse, really across the world these days,” Luna told JNS.

“What happens in New York, what happens in the Middle East, anywhere is connected to what we do,” he said. “So having that situational awareness is absolutely key.”

Emada Tingirides, an assistant chief at the Los Angeles Police Department who oversees the operations office, spoke at the event. She was a previous winner of an ADL award.

Tingirides said that police officers who work on hate crimes take a “holistic approach” and that “having law enforcement jurisdictions from across this county, Orange County, Ventura County to share information to prevent that next crime or prevent that next victim is extremely important.”

She told JNS that in the wake of the county’s report from December, “we need to move in the right direction.”

“That’s starting with prevention and understanding and prosecution,” she said. “When we do find those individuals that are responsible for those hate crimes, we need the justice system to ensure that they don’t repeat those offenses again.”

Ian Buchowiecki, a deputy at the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department who won an ADL award, told JNS that investigators scour a suspect’s statements, writings and actions to understand if there’s a hate crime.

A “textbook example from our academy” would be someone spray painting a Nazi symbol on a rabbi’s garage door, he said.

“Obviously, this is not just vandalism. It’s driven by hateful ideology,” Buchowiecki told JNS. “What we would have to prove is that the perpetrator was aware that it was a rabbi’s house and that he spray-painted that swastika on that house to intimidate or threaten that person because of their beliefs.”

Charlie Peña, another deputy from San Bernardino County who was awarded, told JNS that part of probing hate crimes starts with the public.

“A lot of our best eyes are the public,” he said. “They’ll report it. There are some new systems where they can go anonymously, not ever mention their name. But they’re providing info for us.”