MISSION VIEJO : Panel Offers Ways to Fight Hate Crimes

Its focus was on Mission Viejo, but a blue-ribbon hate-crime task force used part of its final meeting Monday to discuss the racial tension that flared at Westminster High School last week.

“Could what happened in Westminster happen in Mission Viejo?” asked panel member George Williams, president of the Orange County Urban League. “Most definitely, yes.” Williams was referring to separate incidents at Westminster High School last week involving Asian and Latino students.

The task force, which disbanded after its third and final meeting Monday, was made up of race-relations experts and City Council members. It was formed last July in response to a series of racial conflicts in South County, including the alleged beating of a 12-year-old black youth by a white man in Mission Viejo.

“We’re sitting here in a county that has changed its racial character so rapidly that nobody has noticed,” said Rusty Kennedy, director of the county Human Relations Commission and a task force member. “We’re going through some painful times.”

Among other recommendations, the task force suggested that the City Council head off the possibility of confrontations similar to those in Westminster by funding race-awareness programs in the city’s schools.

Among programs recommended was an educational course called “A World of Difference,” a national project developed by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, which has been used on a trial basis in the Capistrano Unified School District.

The program provides training to educators, who teach their students “to appreciate the value of every individual and help them understand that we all don’t come from the same place,” said Bill Eller, the district’s associate superintendent of education.

The program’s trial period, which is in its second year, is working well, Eller said. “Along with reading, writing and arithmetic, understanding other people are the values we want to stress here.”

Other recommendations the task force supported included establishing a “neighborhood system” under which citizens would lend moral support to hate-crime victims. Also, the task force said the City Council should look into offering a reward to anyone turning in perpetrators of hate crimes.

In past meetings, the group discussed the possibility of creating a hot line for hate-crime victims and hiring a special prosecutor to pursue hate crimes committed in the city.

Neither was deemed necessary by the group. Kennedy said the Human Relations Commission is in the process of setting up a countywide hot line, and after hearing from the Sheriff’s Department and district attorney’s office, the task force concluded that county officials are doing “an excellent job” of combatting hate crimes, said Mayor Robert A. Curtis, a task force member.