Ariela Rivkin remembers seeing spray-painted swastikas on her way to class in the spring of 2016. There had been a rash of anti-Semitic vandalism reported that spring, and she happened to pass by some of it one day.
“It impacts your ability to walk to class and walk past it,” says Rivkin, a UW-Madison senior who is Jewish. “You see that someone, or a few someones — or maybe a lot of someones who are silent about it — believe that you don’t have a place here.”
Rivkin wasn’t alone in coping with hate crimes. According to an annual report from the UW-Madison Police Department, hate crime reports on campus property surged in 2016, jumping from two in 2015 to 20 last year. There were no reports of hate crimes on campus property in either 2013 or 2014.
A single offender, Timothy Arnold, committed 14 of the 20 hate crimes, which were anti-Semitic vandalisms, according to the UWPD’s Annual Security Report and Annual Fire Safety Report. He was later arrested and pleaded guilty to some of the charges, says Marc Lovicott, the department’s public information officer. Arnold and two accomplices spray painted white supremacist symbols on walls around campus and downtown in the spring of 2016.
UWPD attributes the spike in hate crimes to increased reporting, says Lovicott. A recent Department of Justice report found the majority of hate crimes have gone unreported to law enforcement.
“We don’t necessarily believe we, in general, saw an increase in individuals committing hate crimes,” Lovicott says.
“Some of the national discussion” could have contributed to the increased reporting, Lovicott adds. The local rise in hate crimes, though larger than most, reflects a national trend.
Rivkin, who is on the UW-Madison Hillel Foundation’s board of directors, believes that there are both more hate crimes and more people reporting them.
“I know that people are reporting a lot more — and that’s a good thing. The feeling definitely is that there has been an uptick in the incidents themselves,” Rivkin says. “I know when I go places and I wear my Jewish star, and I wear it proudly, I do get looks. I expect that every once-in-a-while, unfortunately, someone is going to say something. I’ve heard a Heil Hitler a few times on this campus directed at me.”
Her friends have had similar experiences, leaving many feeling unsafe. And the trend appears to be continuing. On Sept. 20, swastikas and “Trump Rules” were found spray-painted on a stone monument outside the historic synagogue at James Madison Park.
Although the majority of hate crimes in the UWPD report were against people of faith, others were directed at people of color, immigrants and women.
The UWPD report is compiled, in part, to ensure the agency is compliant with the Clery Act — a federal law that requires universities to compile statistics about campus crimes. In this report, a hate crime is defined as a criminal offense that is motivated by the offender’s negative bias against a person based on race, gender, religion, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity or national origin.
The crimes reported on campus property last year were 16 incidents of vandalism, three acts of intimidation and one aggravated assault.
Lovicott says the hate crimes taint the campus environment. “You’re talking about committing a crime against an individual based on their differences, their religion, their sexual orientation,” Lovicott says. “That’s horrible. I think it has a detrimental effect on everyone.”
