After Nathan Hochman, Los Angeles County district attorney, told JNS at a press conference that he was unaware how many of the 66 hate crime cases that his office has filed this year had targeted Jews, JNS followed up with his office on the matter.
“Our case management system does not track or categorize cases by religion,” Hochman’s office told JNS. “As a result, we do not currently maintain statistics based on a defendant’s or victim’s religious affiliation.”
A Jewish communal leader told JNS that revelation is concerning.
“It is critical law enforcement understands the breakdown of religious minority groups impacted by hate crimes,” Evan Bernstein, incoming CEO of the more than 180-year-old nonprofit B’nai B’rith International, told JNS.
That is particularly true when the minority group is Jews, who are “consistently the most targeted religious minority nationally, based on FBI statistics,” according to Bernstein.
“Law enforcement has limited resources and needs to be able to know where those resources are best used to protect the most targeted populations,” he told JNS. “It is critical that the Jewish community builds relationships with its local first responders for this reason.”
Hochman, who is Jewish, and colleagues said at the press conference, which was held at the Los Angeles Hall of Justice on Thursday, that while the overall number of reported hate crimes has declined very slightly in the city, religion-based hate crimes have surged.
Hate crimes based on religion account for 23% of all the hate crime cases that the county district attorney’s office has filed from Jan. 1 to Aug. 4—up from 13% in 2025 and 2% in 2024, law enforcement officials said at the press conference. The overall number of hate crimes that his office has filed, 66, is on pace to be about four fewer for the year than the 117 in 2025, but well above the 88 in 2024, officials said.
Hochman told attendees of the press conference that the “most interesting development” has been the “spike” of religion-based hate crimes in the past two years.
“We are going after those religious-based hate criminals with the full panoply of laws that we have to go after them,” he said. He added that reported hate crimes are “trending slightly down.”
JNS asked Hochman after the conference why he thinks religion-based hate crimes have been on the rise despite a slight decline of hate crimes overall.
“There’s been a lot of tension, especially since Oct. 7, in the religious communities that make up Los Angeles County,” the county district attorney told JNS. “People have targeted the Jewish community. They’ve targeted the Islamic community.”
“I’m hoping a press conference like this, that makes it crystal clear that the people who do this targeting are ending up in the criminal justice system and hopefully in prison, at some point, will deter the future hate criminals from engaging in misconduct,” Hochman told JNS.
Data from the New York City Police Department has suggested a rise in hate crimes targeting Muslims, but those incidents consistently pale in comparison to anti-Jewish hate crimes. Last month, for example, Jews, who make up about 10% of New Yorkers, were targeted in nearly 70% of all hate crimes in the Big Apple, which was up 53.3% compared to July 2025.
Some 58% of reported hate crimes in New York City last month targeted Jews, compared to 12% against Muslims, per official city statistics. In the first seven months of 2026, 56.9% of hate crimes in New York City have targeted Jews, compared to 7% targeting Muslims. That represented an 8.5% increase of anti-Jewish and 62.5% increase of anti-Muslim hate crimes compared to that period in the prior year.
Hate crimes targeting Muslims were up from 16 to 26, while such incidents targeting Jews rose from 189 to 205.
Hochman told JNS that Jewish Angelenos should take away from the press conference that “we are actively prosecuting those who engage in hate criminal activity against the Jewish community.”
“These are folks that are now looking at years in state prison,” he said. “We are going after the hate criminals with the full force of the law and we’ll continue to do so, and we look forward very much to working in connection with the Jewish community.”
Hochman said that Jewish institutions and their security personnel have provided information that helps the district attorney’s office build cases, including locating video footage and witnesses whom his office can interview.
The “Jewish community has been doing a much better job, I think, of reporting hate crime than it was doing in the past,” he told JNS.
“We hope that these combined efforts will lead to a deterrent of hate criminals targeting the Jewish community going forward,” he said.
At the press conference, in which Jim McDonnell, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, also addressed attendees, Hochman highlighted some of the hate crime cases which his office has prosecuted.
One is the ongoing prosecution of Bruce Alfred Lion, heir to the second-largest raisin company in California, who faces three felony hate crime charges, as well as charges of violating civil rights and two criminal threat counts, for having allegedly “shouted antisemitic threats at his next-door neighbor, a rabbi leading a Shabbat prayer service” in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on June 5.
Lion is scheduled to have a mental health competency hearing on Aug. 21. Depending upon the results, he could be required to take part in two years of outpatient mental health treatment or to go through “competency restoration treatment” at a community or state hospital. Or he could face up to seven years and four months in state prison, per the district attorney’s office.
Hochman also cited his office’s prosecution of Jose Antonio Montes-Gutierrez, Jr., who is charged with felony counts of vandalism and hate crimes for writing “backwards swastikas and antisemitic graffiti on Jewish-owned or affiliated businesses, and public property near those locations” in 2025 on July 4 and 12 and on Aug. 10 and 30.
A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Aug. 14, when Montes-Guterrez Jr. faces up to nine years and four months in state prison, according to the district attorney’s office.-
