Hate crime reports have soared in D.C. Prosecutions have plummeted.

The hatred that day couldn't have been clearer to Ashly Taylor.

She had endured it ever since coming out as a teenager, when strangers said lewd things to her for holding another girl’s hand and one of her own relatives called her a “dyke.” Yet the 27-year-old had never encountered a problem on the construction sites she’d worked since high school, where she was just another laborer in baggy clothes and a hard hat, until a chilly February afternoon in 2018.

She had been sitting in the back of a pickup truck in Southeast Washington during a break from digging a ditch when a new hire sauntered up and began harassing her for being a lesbian.

“Why you dress like you’re a boy?” demanded Enjoli Gaffney, a felon who had been released from prison seven months earlier. Then he launched into a lurid tirade that ended, according to court records, with him vowing to have sex with her and ordering her to climb out of the truck so he could kiss her.

When Taylor got out to confront him, court documents show, Gaffney pulled a small silver and black pistol from his waistband and pointed it at her chest.

Then he pulled the trigger.

Hate crimes are surging across the country, with racist slurs scrawled on schools and houses of worship, assaults on gay and transgender people, and white gunmen targeting Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue and Latinos at an El Paso Walmart.

In Washington, the number of attacks investigated by police as bias-motivated reached an all-time high of 204 last year. The District had the highest per capita hate-crime rate of any major city in the country, according to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/local/dc-hate-prosecutions-drop/?wpisrc=al_news__alert-local--alert-national&wpmk=1