COUNTYWIDE : Gay Leaders to Tabulate Hate Crimes

Citing a report showing that hate crimes against gay men and lesbians nationwide rose 42% in 1990, leaders of Orange County’s gay and lesbian community announced a plan to “count and counter” such crimes in the county.

Jeff LeTourneau, chair of the Orange County Visibility League, a local gay-rights group, said at a Santa Ana news conference that he believes that “gay-bashings” occur at a higher rate here than in the rest of the country, but no statistics for Orange County are available.

In Los Angeles, 199 hate crimes were reported in 1990, a 20% increase over 1989, according to the report, conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute in Washington.

The local effort will include lobbying “on a city-by-city basis” for local laws against so-called bias crimes, calling on police to enforce existing state laws, setting up a 24-hour reporting and referral phone line, and educating gays and lesbians in safety precautions and self-defense.

Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, said a hate crimes network made up of minority community organizations, police departments and the commission would be formed to bring together scattered reports and “develop a better picture” of the number of bias crimes in Orange County.

Many gay and lesbian victims of bias crimes do not report them because they are afraid of losing their jobs or having their families find out about their sexual orientation, according to Georgia Garrett-Norris, a Santa Ana gay-rights attorney. She said that of 36 people who called her office about a hate crime in 1989 and 1990, only four had reported the crime to the human rights commission.

Hate crimes are “more prevalent in Orange County than in some parts of the country,” LeTourneau said. He said he believes that conservative groups such as the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition “plot and strategize how to deny gays and lesbians their civil rights” and “foster hatred.”

However, Kennedy said he believes that most Orange County citizens would condemn hate crimes. “I don’t believe the county condones these crimes, and I’m here as an official of the county to say we won’t tolerate them,” he said.

Steve Sheldon, a spokesperson for the Traditional Values Coalition, said his organization “does not condone hate crimes, which are deplorable. Our public policy activities . . . do not have to do with hate crimes.”

Sheldon said he felt LeTourneau “is using the issue of hate crimes, which everyone is against, to further his homosexual political agenda.”

The California penal code was amended in 1987 to prohibit attacks on persons or property motivated by sexual orientation, race, religion, or any of several other categories, and to enhance penalties for such crimes. However, John Duran, an Anaheim gay-rights attorney, said the law has yet to trickle down to most police officers.