Hate Crimes Can Be Difficult to Prove

A day after making a classroom speech about racial equality at Saugus High School a month ago, 17-year-old Mohamed Mostafa was assaulted by a group of white teen-agers who taunted him with racial slurs and then beat him up on his way to school.

“They said keep your mouth shut,” while punching and kicking him, Mohamed recalls. “And go back to Africa.”

He said in an interview that he did not recognize the six or seven youths, and that he didn’t think they went to Saugus High or belonged to the several student groups there “that don’t like other races.”

Was it a hate crime?

No one knows for sure, but the FBI and detectives in the Santa Clarita Sheriff’s Station are investigating to see. Were followers of white supremacist groups or skinheads involved? Did racist flyers motivate the attackers?

No one can say, although one sheriff’s deputy says the incident appears unrelated to the flyers. But as is frequently the case when it comes to hate crime, authorities say it is nearly impossible to determine what drives such an attack.

Even though there have been many other incidents that could be considered hate crimes in Los Angeles, “It’s kind of a hidden crime,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Kay Shafer. “People tend to think, ‘Oh, I got beaten up, robbed, my home was vandalized.’ A lot of times they don’t recognize that the motive was bias or racism. A lot of times law enforcement doesn’t recognize it either.”

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti has made hate crimes a top priority in his fledgling administration, Shafer said, after years of disjointed monitoring by prosecutors and police.

Although the Los Angeles Police Department tracks them, few other police agencies in the state log hate crimes: An FBI report issued last January showed that California lags far behind most other states in implementing the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, which calls for such monitoring.

New York state, for instance, had 773 participating police agencies that logged 943 hate crime incidents in 1991, and even Iowa had 201 agencies that reported 89 incidents. But only two police agencies in California participated, reporting five crimes, according to the FBI.

And white supremacist groups such as WAR--the White Aryan Resistance--now practice “leaderless resistance,” in which no one takes credit for any conspiratorial behavior.

“It is very, very difficult,” to link hate groups to specific crimes, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Marc R. Greenberg, “and it is by design.”

The Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith opened a special Valley satellite office in November after it determined that half of all the complaints from the several counties that make up the regional district come from the area.

Churches and temples have been vandalized, people get threatening messages and flyers and crosses have been burned on lawns.

“People used to regard the Valley as being immune to those sort of influences,” said the ADL’s Mary Krasn. “We’re not.”