Awareness a Weapon in Fighting Hate Crimes : Prejudice: The Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission tries to ease tensions among diverse groups. Sometimes it’s an uphill battle.

For more than a decade, Bunny Nightwalker Hatcher has waged a war she knows she cannot win.

A consultant for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, Hatcher has gone toe-to-toe with the bigotry and ignorance that have fueled an increase in hate crimes in Los Angeles County over the last eight years.

Despite her efforts, her foes persevere.

“Sometimes I feel very helpless and frustrated,” said Hatcher, whose agency serves as county government’s primary liaison with the region’s rapidly growing minority communities.

“Even if we could eliminate 99% of the bigotry, a few bigots with spray-paint cans and matches can do a lot of damage. The Human Relations Commission is trying to fight it all, but we won’t wipe the last bigot off the face of the Earth.”

She knows they aren’t even close.

Hatcher and her colleagues say the number of hate crimes--illegal acts committed against someone because of the victim’s race, sex, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation--are steadily rising.

Between 1980 and 1988, the number of racially and religiously motivated hate crimes logged by the commission rocketed from 26 to 206, according to commission reports.

One of the most recent examples of the continuing problem came over the Thanksgiving holiday, when the Beverly Hills office of black businesswoman Larryette De Bose was vandalized and spray-painted with racial slurs and white supremacist slogans. There have been no arrests.

But even in the face of worsening figures, the 45-year-old Human Relations Commission continues its fight--maintaining a vigilant effort to ease tensions among the fast-diversifying populace and to combat the worsening backlash that commission members say is often attendant with such growth.

“Many whites are fearful of the diversity,” said Eugene Mornell, executive director of the commission. “They see a changing population, over which they have no control. They hear languages that they don’t understand. We try to get them to understand their feelings, to see that they are not suffering because of some black person or some Latino person.”

Mornell said such prejudice saps the potential of the county to develop into a full-fledged melting pot.

“L.A. County is a world community,” he added. “We have an opportunity to be a model for the world, but hate crime and tensions show ways that we haven’t achieved that. (The commission’s) goal is to create an equitable, multicultural community.”

Indeed, the commission must unite what many consider America’s new Ellis Island--a county with a racial and ethnic make-up that includes, according to commission figures, more than 2 million people of Mexican descent, more than 1 million people of African descent, more than 300,000 Korean-Americans, 175,000 Japanese-Americans and almost 150,000 Arab-Americans, among others.

Commission executives said it is possible to stake out common ground for such a panorama of cultures, but, to do so, the idea of cultural equality must be reinforced.

“It’s possible for people of varying cultures to live together,” said Ray Bartlett, president of the commission. “We don’t have to eliminate other cultures. No one culture is better than another one. I think we can all live together in harmony.”

To help promote that harmony, the commission has 15 members--three appointed by each of the five county supervisors--and employs 20 full- and part-time staff members, including 16 consultants who act as liaisons between the county and its varied communities.

Known chiefly for its annual report on hate crimes within the county, the commission has also conducted studies on the racial attitudes of schoolchildren and networked with local community organizations.

It has also created a few groups of its own to soothe the region’s racial pains. For example, when conflict arose between African-Americans and Korean-Americans during the early 1980s, the commission united local business leaders from the two groups under the Black Korean Alliance.

“The alliance is preventive in nature,” said Jai Lee Wong, one of the commission’s representatives in the organization. “We do what we can in educational activities, to help the people become more comfortable. We feel that the tension (between the groups) is an economic one.”

However, a recent boycott by African-Americans of a swap meet run by Korean-Americans showed that all is still not well between the communities.

Despite the efforts of the commission to help improve relations among some groups, the acts of hatred continue to mount.

On Sept. 28, an 18-year-old white Westchester man allegedly screamed racial slurs at five black children, ages 9 through 12, and hurled pizza and soda cans at them while the youngsters stood at a bus stop. The man, Craig Leck, was charged with eight criminal counts.

Even the recent vandalism at four churches by AIDS activists constitutes a hate crime, commission members said.

“The act was aimed at the Catholic Church,” said Hatcher, who tracks most of the county’s hate crimes for the commission. “It was condemning its doctrine. Vandalizing the churches made that a hate crime.”

The commission has not intervened in that dispute.

Mornell was quick to point out that the rise or fall of hate crimes in the region is not an accurate index of the commission’s success.

“If hate crimes go up or down, there’s no way we can take credit or blame for that,” he said. “We’re trying to promote better relations, and, obviously, we don’t want hate crimes to rise, but we can’t be blamed for the increase.”

Consultant Larry Aubry, who has spent 22 years working for the commission, said the success of the commission lies in its ability to influence public policy.

“Our success has come in causing government and those in positions of power to be aware of the problems,” Aubry said.

Even so, Aubry called the commission’s success “moderate,” faulting the county for failing to adequately maintain the agency. He and Mornell said the size of the commission’s annual budget--$1.3 million, doled out by the county Board of Supervisors--has stifled the effectiveness of the agency.

“That’s only 1/70th of 1% of the county budget,” Mornell said. “We have to tailor our programs to fit the budget. I’m not telling the Board of Supervisors where they should take the money from, but we do need more money. We will be one of the last agencies to get a fax machine.”

A spokesman for a county supervisor said the county remains committed to the success of the commission, although there is little chance that it can increase the commission’s funding.

“I’m sure a larger budget would help the commission,” said Dawson Oppenheimer, a spokesman for Supervisor Mike Antonovich. “But (the supervisor) would not want to take away more money from programs to prevent child abuse, fires or crime.”

Despite the commission’s budgetary shortcomings, local civic leaders and officials from other government agencies praised its efforts. Although many community groups monitor hate crimes, they said, the commission is the only one that monitors all groups.

“Usually, the (hate crimes) we hear about, we report to them,” said Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. “I think they are effective in terms of the monitoring. They have to rely on the volunteer reportage from the communities.”

Tom Greep, who tracks hate crimes for the Sheriff’s Department, praised the commission for its vigilance and described its relationship with his agency as symbiotic.

“They are very good,” Greep said. “They’ve coordinated a lot of information that we have been able to use. They have made a lot of people aware of the problem with hate crimes.”

But the commission’s message has not reached everyone, said Hatcher, and never will.

“Hate is so complex,” she said. “It can be anywhere on the spectrum--from some adolescent acting stupid to get attention to some serious hate groups. There will always be bigots in the world. What we hope to do is diminish their number and their impact, make bigotry so unacceptable that they have to keep it in the closet.