NEW YORK CITY — Reports of violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the city were way down in 2014, according to The Anti-Violence Project.
The organization, which tracks assault, harassment and other attacks aimed at LGBT and gender-non-conforming people, received 361 reports of such attacks in 2014, compared to 594 in 2013 — a drop of nearly 40 percent, according to the group's annual release of attack numbers.
But fewer reports don't mean less violence, according to the group.
“It really isn’t that violence has gone down. It isn’t that,” said Shelby Chestnut, AVP’s director of community organizing.
Instead, Chestnut attributed the drop to decreased media attention and organizing. Several high-profile cases raised awareness and boosted the number of reports in 2013, she said.
In 2013, Islan Nettles, a transgender woman, was beaten to death in Harlem and Mark Carson, a gay man, was shot and killed in Greenwich Village.
Chestnut said that a lack of homicides should not distract from the other forms of violence LGBT people face.
"I didn’t get something thrown at me, I only got LGBT epithets, so it was a good day," she said. "But really it's not a good day.”
Transgender people of color are the disproportionate targets of hate violence in New York, according to the report.
Last year, people of color accounted for 72 percent of victims in all reports of hate violence to AVP.
Twelve percent of reporters identified as transgender or gender non-conforming, with trans women reporting the most violence against them.
For their population, the violence against trans people of color is disproportionately high, Chestnut said.
"They represent a much smaller portion of the entire population and they have some of the largest numbers in experiences of hate violence,” she said.
In the latest incident, a 28-year-old transgender woman was pushed onto subway tracks in the East Village last week.
Only about half of the reports of violence AVP receives are reported to police, the report said.
Many who did report their attacks to the NYPD encountered verbal abuse, slurs, and physical and sexual violence from police, the report said.
In 9 percent of cases involving police violence, the victims were themselves arrested when reporting, according to AVP.
Reports of police misconduct in such instances rose 60 percent since last year, from 48 to 77 instances, despite the fact that overall reports of violence decreased, AVP said.
