Officials Appeal for United Front Against Hate Crimes

Responding to an increasing number of hate crimes in the San Fernando Valley, a panel of top police officials, representatives of Jewish groups and civil rights leaders Friday urged residents to combat these incidents by more aggressively reporting them and joining a network of groups that help victims.

Members of the panel said the magnitude of the problem can be attributed to the area’s growing ethnic diversity, a heightened willingness among victims to report hate crimes and a large Jewish population--which ranks as the most frequent target of crimes motivated by religious hatred.

The panel met in West Hills to discuss ways to combat hate crimes a day after the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations released a study that showed hate crimes reaching record levels throughout Los Angeles County in 1991, the seventh consecutive year in which the record was broken. Countywide, homosexual men were reported to be the most frequent victims of these crimes.

The largest number of incidents were reported in downtown Los Angeles, with 273, followed by Long Beach, with 58, and Van Nuys with 34. Much of the attention is being focused on the San Fernando Valley because seven of the 11 communities reporting the largest numbers of hate crimes are located there.

“The news is very bleak this year; I was nearly in tears when I wrote the report,” said Bunny Nightwalker Hatcher, a senior consultant with the County Commission on Human Relations. The panel discussion was sponsored by the office of Mayor Tom Bradley, the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles.

Although it was designed to provide information on how to safeguard synagogues, churches, schools and other community institutions against hate crimes, the talk focused more generally on the causes of the phenomenon.

According to the county report, Valley communities reported 59 crimes in 1991 that were motivated by religious hatred.

Mary Krasn, assistant director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles office, said about half the reported hate crimes against Jews that come to her office originate in the Valley. An estimated 250,000 of the city’s 600,000 Jews live in the Valley, she said.

In the last few weeks, the Valley has been the site of a spate of anti-Semitic vandalism, including three incidents in which swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti were scrawled on the walls of the Valley Torah High School in North Hollywood, Cal State Northridge and a new home in Studio City.

Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Mark A. Kroeker, who is in charge of Valley operations, said he believes the Valley’s growing ethnic diversity plays a role in the increasing number of hate crimes.

Many of the Valley’s established, mostly white neighborhoods, he said, have recently become the home for more minorities, including Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Latinos. “The Valley is changing extremely rapidly,” he said.

In part, the increase can be attributed to the success of police and civil rights groups in persuading victims to report the incidents, said Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Ron Frankle, who heads the department’s hate crime investigations unit. “What we are seeing now is hate crimes are starting to be reported all over the city,” he said.

But Kroeker said police still believe many of these crimes go unreported, partly because people do not always recognize when they are a victim of a hate crime.

Law enforcement officials and Jewish leaders said much is being done to address the increase, including the recent adoption by the City Council of an ordinance that provides $500 rewards for information leading to the arrest of those who commit hate crimes.

“We want to make it very difficult on those people who will randomly commit a hate crime and then go out and brag about it,” Frankle said.

Krasn said the Anti-Defamation League will open an office in the Valley by the end of the year and has recently formed a coalition of volunteers to provide emotional support, housing, financial support and legal advice to the victims of hate crimes.

The commission’s Nightwalker Hatcher said a related problem is that people often are reluctant to come to the aid of hate crime victims. “We are an extremely diverse county and we are not doing a good job of getting along,” she said.

David A. Lehrer, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, said hate crimes are particularly damaging because they target an entire race, group, nationality or religion.

“The only goal of the perpetrators of these crimes was to hurt and denigrate a people,” he said.