It can happen here.
Not just in Massachusetts, but next door. And it’s probably worse than we think.
Late last week, Statehouse reporter Christian M. Wade wrote that hate crimes in Massachusetts reached an eight-year high in 2023.
There were 557 such crimes reported to local law enforcement agencies in 2023, according to the state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security. Overall there was a 31% increase over 2022 among all demographics. That includes 20 reports of anti-Arab crimes, a 185% increase, and 119 anti-Jewish crimes, a 70% increase over 2022.
Many of the incidents occurred after the Oct.7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 and led to the abductions of about 240 others.
Back in Massachusetts, 127 cities and towns reported at least one antisemitic incident in 2023, an increase of almost 80% over 2022, according to the New England Chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. Those incidents involved everything from assaults to vandalism of Jewish institutions to white supremacist propaganda in the schools.
Rabbi Ron Fish, the interim executive director of the New England chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, called the numbers “simply stunning.”
“We call upon everyone who cares about living in a decent society to stop this rise in anti-Jewish hate,” he said in a statement. “Antisemitism is not a Jewish problem. It is a society problem.”
We here on the North Shore and in the Merrimack Valley learned that first-hand earlier this week with the arrest of Matthew Scouras, 34, of Beverly, who is facing a raft of charges, including multiple gun violations and threatening to rape Jewish women and encouraging others to shoot people outside of synagogues.
In a search of Scouras’ home after the arrest, authorities found a Nazi flag, a .9 mm Glock “ghost gun” with no serial number, six boxes of ammunition, three large-capacity rifle magazines, and myriad other weapon parts.
Police said they were acting on a tip from the FBI that Scouras, who is being held without bail in the Middleton Jail, had posted antisemitic threats on the social media site 4chan.
“I have the names and addresses of very (slur) in my neighborhood,” Scouras wrote, according to police. “I have so much ammo.”
That should send a chill up the spine of every Beverly resident – in fact, up everyone’s spine.
“Okay, people! Right here in our backyard,” Rabbi Mendel Barber of Chabad of Beverly-Salem said Tuesday. “It’s a moment like this when we think that to this man, every single one of us was exactly the same. He didn’t discriminate between orthodox or not, or any level of observance.”
Hate isn’t limited to Beverly, of course. And it’s not directed solely at our Jewish and Muslim neighbors. There has also been an increase in crimes targeting Blacks, Latinos, Asians, gays and lesbians, transgender people and immigrants in recent years, as Wade reported.
There were nine instances of hate crimes on record in Haverhill in 2023, the largest number in the north of Boston region, according to the state report. Danvers had seven, Salem six and Amesbury three. Lest we think those are modest numbers, the data is skewed because more than 300 public safety agencies didn’t submit hate-crime reports to the state.
That would be a good place to start when considering how to address the situation: We need every state agency making reports. And we need people to feel comfortable making those reports.
“If you’re a member of the African-American community or the LGBTQ community, a lot of times you don’t think of the police as a place to go for safety,” Northeastern University criminologist Jack McDevitt told NewsNation in 2023.
Even the partial reporting shows we have a long way to go.