Violence Against Minorities on Rise : Bias: Gay men have supplanted African Americans as the primary target of hate crimes in Los Angeles County.

Michael Floyd thought it would never happen to him.

But soon after the 28-year-old gay man moved into a Van Nuys apartment complex in 1993, his life became a nightmare. It started when his building manager called him “fag” in front of other tenants. Someone scratched a huge “F” into his car. He found excrement smeared on his front door. One neighbor shoved him, and another threatened to kill him.

“Why are you doing this?” a shaken Floyd asked.

The answer came back loud and clear: Because he was gay.

Floyd called the police seven times during 1993 but declined to file charges after the assault, mistakenly believing that the torment would stop. After other incidents, police told him it was tough to solve anonymous acts of vandalism and that they could not act on threats unless accompanied by an illegal act.

“I felt so helpless,” recalled Floyd, who moved to West Hollywood in January because he feared for his life. “I thought: ‘Do I have to get killed before the police will do something?’ I’d heard about homophobia and harassment, but I never thought it would happen to me. I thought people would treat me as an individual.”

Floyd’s case is not unique. Last week, Los Angeles County released its annual hate crimes report, which recorded 783 such crimes in 1993, a 6.4% jump over the previous year. For the first time since 1980, when the county began tracking, gay men supplanted African Americans as the primary target.

Hate crimes are increasing across the board--and they are getting more violent. Although the stereotypical act of hatred may be a spray-painted swastika or scrawled racial epithet, almost one-third of hate crimes in 1993 were assaults, 105 with deadly weapons, according to the study.

The vast majority will go unprosecuted. According to the county Commission on Human Relations, only 12 hate crimes came to trial last year. Trials in two more cases, in which people were killed, are pending.

Floyd’s case illustrates the difficulty that victims and law enforcement agencies face in recognizing and prosecuting such crimes. Los Angeles Police Department officials will not comment on how many hate crimes lead to arrests, and the district attorney’s office cannot break out hate crimes on its computers.

“We struggle with overwhelming odds at every level,” said Kay Shafer, the hate crimes coordinator for the district attorney’s office.

Many victims--including Floyd--say they did not know there was a law against hate crimes. Others are not sure what qualifies as a hate crime. The Human Relations Commission says leaning out of a car window and calling someone a racially charged name would not qualify. Spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue would. Obscene or threatening phone calls that contain racial, ethnic, religious, homophobic or sexist slurs are hate crimes. But a fight between a white man and a black man would not be logged as a hate crime unless racial epithets were exchanged.

Community groups monitor the figures closely. A spokesman for the American Jewish Committee noted that Jews are victims in disproportionate numbers--they constitute only 5% of the Los Angeles County population but account for 89.5% of all religious hate crimes. Frank Berry, a spokesman for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said gays may have a higher profile this year but that the number of hate crimes against African Americans is still alarming.

Consider Robert Lee Johnson, who is African American. Johnson said he and his family were the target of a Latino street gang.

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It started with racial taunts. His daughters were assaulted on the way to the market. In February, Johnson was shot as he watched TV in his living room. Two weeks later, someone threw a pipe bomb into his rented Norwalk home, which burned down. The family, which included children and grandchildren, lost everything they had. Now living in Compton, Johnson is trying to put the trauma behind him.

However, he said, “We deal with it every day. It’s always there. It will probably always be there.”

Johnson is frustrated by the limits of the system. Initially, he said, the Sheriff’s Department “did a lot of hesitating. When we called, it was like ‘No one’s hurt.’ They got offended when my son told them it was a Latino gang. They said, ‘How did you know it was a Mexican? What was the motive?’ Suspicion’s being turned on me. We haven’t committed any crime.”

Shanon Hodges, a gay African American, recalls the difficulty he had persuading police that he was the victim of a hate crime in 1989. Hodges had gone to see about renting a Silver Lake apartment and was walking down the street about 9:30 p.m.

Three white skinheads between the ages of 17 and 19 approached, and Hodges, who sensed trouble, began to run. One youth yelled, “Nigger faggot, I’m going to kill you,” Hodges said, and stabbed him in the back with a jagged six-inch knife.

Hodges staggered down the street and fell into the first open door. It was a gay bar, whose manager called police and an ambulance. When police arrived, Hodges said, they pulled on his earrings, called him names and told him the attack was his fault. Hodges said he spent eight hours at County-USC Medical Center waiting to be treated. The assailants were never caught.

An LAPD spokesman declined to comment on the case, saying that “if conduct like that (by the officers) happened, it’s inappropriate, and we have a process for dealing with that, if (Hodges) wants to file a complaint.”

Hodges’ scars--both physical and emotional--remain five years later. He dropped out of art school. He became estranged from friends. He broke off with his lover because, he said, he felt ugly. He tried counseling, but it did not help. He tried drawing, but the pictures were so angry, he tore them up.

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As with the attack on Hodges, many hate crimes occur at night. Assailants use a hit-and-run approach that leaves few clues. Victims, whether gays in the closet, African Americans disaffected with law enforcement or immigrants fearing deportation, often do not call the police.

Immigrants’ rights groups say their clients can be deported if they report a hate crime and an investigation shows that they are here illegally. Some argue that California needs to amend its laws so that victims cannot be deported or kicked out of the military for reporting hate crimes.

Even when victims step forward, community activists say, police do not always log the incident as a hate crime--a charge the police deny. And if arrests are made and charges filed, the district attorney must prove that the defendant committed the crime and that it was motivated by hatred.

“These are among the most underreported and underprosecuted crimes around,” said Brian Levin, a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School, who is legal director for the Center for the Study of Ethnic and Racial Violence.

Even county statistics are incomplete because only nine of about 40 law enforcement agencies provided data. West Covina logged 12 hate crimes last year that were not included in the countywide total of 783. West Covina police crime analyst Anne Gray said the county never requested information on hate crimes; the county said it contacts each agency.

Shafer, of the district attorney’s office, said that thanks to massive media attention and education programs by community groups and law enforcement, awareness about hate crime is growing. But she likens it to the status of domestic violence and sexual assaults 10 or 15 years ago.

Levin estimates that half of all hate crimes still go unreported; in the gay community, he believes, the figure may be as high as 90%. Only about 1% are prosecuted, he said.

“Getting the line officer, who is the most cynical and least trained, to understand what constitutes a hate crime is very difficult,” said Levin, a former police officer who now runs hate crime training programs for various police departments.

Cmdr. John White, the LAPD’s hate crime coordinator, disagrees.

“A lot of people go around bashing the police, but I don’t think there’s a police department in the country that has a system as efficient as us for handling hate crimes,” White said.

Each LAPD division has a hate crimes coordinator, White said. All rookies study the issue at the police academy and receive in-service training, including periodic memos from White. When a hate crime report is filed, follow-up calls are made to the victim’s home.

“We try to find a nexus, a connection between the crime and the person . . . but often there’s not enough evidence. If the suspect didn’t say anything (racist or homophobic), it’s hard to classify it as a hate crime,” White said.

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Hate crimes are up, experts say, because Americans seek scapegoats for their declining living standards. Hate crimes between minority groups are rising as well as crimes against whites.

“When you get this fear and frustration, people revert back to their in-group and want to find a target for their anger,” Levin said. “We still harbor stereotypes, and they’re the trigger that someone who is sick or angry or frustrated can beat up on.”

Society also suffers because hate crimes breed fear and distrust among groups, dividing people into either victims or perpetrators, Levin said. Hate groups recognize the fragility of the inter-group bond and how easy it is to disrupt. They know a burglary will not cause a riot but hope that a hate crime might.

Yet most perpetrators are not members of organized groups. About 85% are male, in their early or mid-teens, and lead a marginal existence, said Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University, who co-wrote “Hate Crimes, the Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed.”

“Twenty years ago they might have stolen hubcaps; now they beat people up,” Levin said. “They are unremarkable types, the kids down the block. Very few wear sheets or armbands or hoods.”

The boy next door was exactly who terrorized John Ruiz and his family in Arleta for two years. Paul M. Downing, who mistakenly believed that Ruiz was Jewish, spray-painted anti-Semitic graffiti and swastikas on the walls, set fires in their home and fired shots into the window.

Ruiz, a Catholic of Spanish ancestry, said he had “a great deal of difficulty” in getting police interested. Detectives turned up nothing. Ruiz turned to the Anti-Defamation League, who persuaded the FBI to pursue it as a civil rights violation. Downing pleaded guilty to eight felonies and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1991.

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But the fight left profound scars. After spending $20,000 on fire repairs, Ruiz sold his home of 15 years, where he had hoped to retire. He lost his job as a national sales manager because he was afraid to leave his family to go on business trips.

Today, Ruiz lives in a security building, in a place he will not reveal. He no longer registers to vote because he fears that Downing could obtain his address. He and his wife flinch each time a motorcycle passes because the hatemonger once harassed them from his motorcycle.

“This has been such a trauma in our lives that we just can’t shake it,” Ruiz said “I am an Everyman. I believe in live and let live. I love my country. And it’s horrifying to me that this can be happening in America. But you can’t let something like this consume your sanity because then he won. To a degree he won anyway. This will always be with us.”