LAPD Urged to Improve Reporting of ‘Hate Crimes’

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley Wednesday called for closer police reporting and monitoring of “hate crimes” directed against racial and religious groups and homosexuals.

Flanked at a City Hall press conference by Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and leaders of minority and homosexual groups, Bradley said, “We will not tolerate it. We will use all of our resources . . . to track them, prevent them, and bring those who perpetrate them to justice.”

Coincidentally, only hours before the press conference, anti-Semitic slogans and obscenities were discovered to have been spray-painted on a Jewish synagogue in the West Hills community near Canoga Park.

Cites Rising Incidence

The rising incidence of similar crimes has been documented by studies, Bradley said, including one by the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. The commission’s 1986 report, based on law enforcement, fair housing and religious organization complaints, said that racially and religiously motivated acts of vandalism and violence climbed 82% last year in the county.

Examples included the firebombing of an interracial couple’s automobile, an ethnically motivated assault against an Arab at his place of work and numerous instances of swastikas painted on Jewish property and KKK slogans on black property.

However, Gates contradicted assertions by Bradley and others that the rise in racially and sexually based crimes has been dramatic.

He said he is “not prepared to say there’s been a huge increase in these sorts of crimes; that’s debatable. But one increase is too many. . . . We don’t find the increase in the city of L.A. . . . but we do need to develop better analysis and better guidelines of what is reported.”

Gates said police already monitor “hate crimes” but will begin to use a more uniform, systematic reporting system.

Gates’ remarks raised the ire of Mark Ridley-Thomas, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and one of those attending the press conference.

“I was shocked and offended by Daryl Gates’ implicit contradiction of the data collected by the county and reported by the civil rights groups,” Ridley-Thomas said. “It indicates his lack of sensitivity to the issue to question the increase that has been documented.”

Gates was not specific about what should be changed in the department’s current monitoring system. A Bradley aide suggested it may amount to simply changing the way police recognize and categorize crimes, so that, for example, racist graffiti is recorded separately from other misdemeanor graffiti.

A coalition of several civil and religious rights groups Wednesday submitted a policy proposal on how to report and handle such crimes. The proposal includes a potentially controversial suggestion that the Police Department also monitor and report complaints “made against a law enforcement agency . . . (when) the complaint alleges violence motivated by one’s race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.”