The U.S. Attorney for D.C. has logged an increase in hate crime prosecutions after facing widespread criticism last year for a sharp drop in the amount of hate crime charges it was choosing to pursue, the Washington Post reports. On Wednesday, at a meeting of the District’s Hate Bias Task Force, the USAO announced that it prosecuted 11 incidents from last year as hate crimes, doubling the number of such prosecutions from the previous two years combined, per the outlet.

The office offered up this data after years of declining to release information about hate crime prosecutions to activists asking for it, the Post reports.

The data release also comes in the wake of harsh criticism of U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jessie K. Liu, who was appointed to her post by President Donald Trump in 2017 (and who has recently been promoted to a top post in the Treasury Department). In August 2019, an exhaustive investigation by the Washington Post found that under Liu, the U.S. attorney’s office had pursued fewer hate crime charges than at any other time in the last decade-–of 113 total hate crime reports in 2017 and 2018, the office prosecuted just four as hate crimes. That decline came at the same time that reports of hate crimes were increasing in the District, according to Metropolitan Police Department data.

This led activists and some members of the D.C. Council to accuse Liu’s office of failing to take crimes involving bias seriously enough. Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen held an oversight hearing in the wake of the investigation where he and others openly criticized Liu’s record on hate crime prosecutions. Liu herself declined to attend, telling DCist that “the committee seems to have reached a conclusion already about our role in investigating and prosecuting hate crimes.”

The Post had to pore over more than 200,000 police and court records to obtain information about the number of hate crime prosecutions the office had pursued, because the office has not released its own data on the subject since Liu took it over three years ago. According to the outlet, Liu’s office told activists asking for the data that “it was not keeping track of hate-crime prosecutions.”

The uptick in hate crime prosecutions is the result of pressure on the office to look more carefully at these cases, a USAO staffer said after the Hate Bias Task Force meeting this week, per the Post. “We are scrutinizing these cases. I don’t think we ought to be penalized for acknowledging that, in response to community feedback, that is what we are doing,” said Renata Cooper, an assistant U.S. attorney and special counsel for policy and legislative affairs.

D.C.’s U.S. attorney’s office is the only one in the country in charge of local, in addition to federal, prosecutions. Activists expressed to the Post that the increased rate gives them some hope that the USAO might be listening to their concerns.

“Now that this information is out in the community, people are saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is something that Washingtonians care about,’” prominent LGBTQ activist Ruby Corado told the outlet. “I’m hoping that we see more change. I’m hoping that the conversation is not over.”

MPD investigated a total of 201 suspected hate crimes in 2019, down slightly from a large spike in 2018, when the department logged 205 suspected hate crimes. The rate of suspected hate crimes had been steadily increasing in the District since 2016. After the election of Trump, the number jumped from 106 in 2016 to 177 in 2017.

The U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to emailed questions from DCist about the uptick in hate crime prosecutions by publication time.