Hate Crimes in County on Rise, Panel Reports

Steve Renteria of West Hollywood often walks to the grocery store in the evening--never really worried about getting mugged, but always cautious.

But one night a couple of months ago he let his guard down.

“My friend Peter and I were a couple of blocks from my house with the groceries in our hands when all of a sudden I felt this club hit me in my temple,” said Renteria, 27, a hair stylist, who said he is homosexual. “My jaw was broken in two, and after I fell to the ground I got kicked and kicked and kicked. I thought I was going to die.”

The attackers did not take Renteria’s money or groceries and never uttered a word during the attack.

After the assault, Renteria said, the attackers looked down on their bloody victims, laughed and directed homosexual epithets at them.

In a report issued Thursday, members of the County Commission on Human Relations said they are alarmed by the increasing number of hate crimes being committed throughout Los Angeles County. The number of hate crimes has increased since the commission began recording them in 1980.

Although most of the crimes are acts of vandalism such as graffiti or defacement, the number of violent crimes is escalating, especially racially motivated crimes and crimes against homosexuals, according to the report.

The number of racially motivated assaults or attempted assaults increased nearly 5% over 1987, according to the report, while “gay-bashing” accounted for the majority of hate crimes committed against homosexuals--64%.

“Unfortunately homophobia is still the most widely accepted form of hatred in this society,” said Tom Coleman of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. “People think of homosexuality as a dirty secret and that it’s OK to attack homosexuals because society is ashamed of them anyway.”

Statistics for the 23-page report, which lists the 267 hate crimes that were reported in the county last year, were gathered from law enforcement agencies, community groups and religious organizations, said Eugene Mornell, executive director of the commission.

Racially motivated violence increased from 16 recorded incidents in 1987 to 23 in 1988.

However, Stewart Kwoh of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center said those figures are the tip of the iceberg.

“We know for a fact that many victims, particularly in the Latino and Asian communities, do not report crimes to police because they come from countries where they learned not to trust police,” Kwoh said.

More than 65% of the racially motivated crimes listed in the report were committed against blacks and included incidents such as pit bulls being set loose on black children in Pacoima early last year and the summertime shooting of an 18-year-old black man in Playa del Rey by a white gunman.

To help stop such incidents, the county commission recommended that law enforcement agencies thoroughly investigate the incidents and prosecute hate crimes as felonies whenever possible.

HATE CRMES IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY: Ethnicity of Victims Blacks 65.3% Asian 13.7% Latino 8.4% Arab 7.3% Armenian 3.2% White / Other 2.1% Source: Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations