GARDEN GROVE : McCarthy Asks Help Against Hate Crimes

Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy Tuesday urged members of Orange County’s Asian community to fight hate crimes by reporting them to police, writing letters about them to elected officials and notifying the press.

McCarthy came to Orange County as part of a statewide campaign to promote a bill he is sponsoring that would increase the criminal sentences for bias crimes, while doubling civil penalties and removing a lid on the amount of punitive damages victims can sue for in court.

“In the 1940s . . . we rounded up tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans and interned them in concentration camps. We didn’t speak up . . . we let that happen,” McCarthy told a gathering at a Garden Grove Korean community center.

“The important point is when hate crimes start happening, everybody ought to speak up. . . ,” said McCarthy, a San Francisco Democrat who is mentioned as a candidate for one of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats.

At the meeting, members of the Korean, Vietnamese, and Indian communities told of hate crimes in their neighborhoods, which ranged from vandalizing trash cans to breaking windows and setting fires. In the Korean community alone, officials have counted at least a dozen cases of hate crimes against people, places of worship, businesses and homes.

Some told McCarthy that they were reluctant to report hate crimes because speaking out brought on more similar incidents.

Anand Chopra, a Garden Grove insurance broker of Indian descent, said two weeks ago he walked into a restaurant and the “tensions of the war” surfaced when a man asked him if he was an Iraqi.