UK police say hate crime reports are up 57 percent after Brexit vote

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/06/29/484038396/after-brexit-vote-u-k-sees-a-wave-of-hate-crimes-and-racist-abuse

Amateur video taken Tuesday on a Manchester tram shows white youths verbally assaulting and threatening another passenger who had asked them to quit using foul language. (Warning: the video contains profanity.) One of the teenagers yells, "Get back to Africa!" while another sprays beer in the man's direction. Manchester police have made three arrests.

In Cambridgeshire, cards reading "Leave the EU/No more Polish vermin" appeared outside some homes and schools after the vote. Poles make up the largest number of EU citizens living in Britain.

And an audibly distressed German woman called LBC, a U.K. talk radio outlet, on Tuesday to say she was too scared to leave her house in London, which she said was in a quiet, middle class neighborhood. Dog excrement was thrown at her door and she was told to "Go back home."

Describing herself as a widow who'd been married to a British doctor, she gave her first name as Karen and said she'd lived in London for 43 years and never experienced anything like this.

"I'm so, so scared," she said, crying. "I haven't been out of the house for three days, because I don't know what to do."

"Before Friday we lived in a tolerant society," said Oana Gorcea, a 32-year-old Romanian who has been in Britain since she was a teenager. "I've been here 13 years, but I've never felt like I had to hide where I came from. But from Friday, things completely changed."

Gorcea, who works for a multinational company in Rugby, about 85 miles northwest of London, told The Associated Press that her street was being patrolled by "English commandos who walk around and try to intimidate non-white, non-English people." The talk of the neighborhood was the dog feces shoved through a local immigrant family's mailbox.

Gorcea's story and others like it have been echoing across social media. Eastern Europeans, Muslims -- even Americans and Germans -- have reported acts of intimidation and harassment. Victims describe an emboldened, angry fringe emerging to crow over the vote; a T-shirt sported by a man at an Armed Forces Day parade in the working class London borough of Havering over the weekend seemed to sum up the new attitude:

"YES! WE WON! NOW SEND THEM BACK."